Still Life: Bloaters on a Piece of Yellow Paper

Van Gogh left the hospital in Arles on 7 January 1889, a fortnight after cutting his ear, and went straight back to work in the Yellow House. What he painted in those weeks was whatever sat in front of him. A drawing board with onions and a letter on it, his own face with the bandage, and this pair of smoked herrings on a scrap of yellow paper. Bloaters were among the cheapest food a man could buy in the south, the standing emblem of a poor meal, and he had already painted a pair of them in Paris two years earlier. The catalogues list it as F 510, made in January 1889. It has never belonged to a museum and is still in private hands.