Still Life with Bloaters

A bloater is a herring, lightly cured and smoked, sold cheap, the kind of thing a poor man in the 1880s ate without a second thought. Van Gogh laid two of them out here, painted small and close, in 1886. He had just arrived in Paris from the Netherlands, where his pictures had been brown and heavy, full of peat and lamplight. In the city he saw what the Impressionists were doing with colour, and a humble plate of fish became somewhere to try it out. The paint is bright and worked in short separate strokes, the table warmed with reds while the fish catch flecks of blue and pink. He could not afford grand subjects, so the everyday food on his own table did the work instead.