Smoked Herrings

Smoked herrings were poor people's food, cheap and plain, and Van Gogh had known the subject for years. Back in The Hague he had drawn the smoking sheds at Scheveningen on the coast, where the fish hung on thin sticks over smouldering sawdust. He returned to it around 1886, but by then he was in Paris, and the difference shows. The herrings are painted a bright yellow, the cloth behind them a clear blue, colours he would never have reached for in his Dutch years. This is one of the first places you can watch his palette lifting out of the browns and greys toward the primary colours that Paris put in front of him. The subject stayed humble even as the colour changed, two dried fish laid on a table, nothing more.