两只螃蟹

Van Gogh painted these two crabs in January 1889, in the first days after a very bad month. Weeks earlier, in Arles, he had cut off part of his own ear and been taken to hospital. On the 7th of January he wrote to his brother Theo that he wanted to ease back into work with a still life or two, just to get used to painting again. So he set down two crabs, one flipped helplessly on its back, one upright, against a flat green ground. He had been collecting Japanese prints, and the idea probably came from a Hokusai crab he had seen reproduced in a magazine Theo sent him. You can see it in the short dashed strokes on the shells, laid down like brush calligraphy. There is no tabletop, no horizon, nothing to steady the two creatures in their bright empty space.