Crab on its Back

This small 1887 study of an upturned crab painted in Paris connects two distinct streams of Van Gogh's artistic formation: the Dutch still-life tradition of humble objects treated with full painterly seriousness, and the Japanese influence absorbed through his extensive print collection. Crustaceans appear in seventeenth-century Dutch pronk still lifes alongside lobsters and oysters as demonstrations of the painter's virtuosity in rendering complex, iridescent surfaces; they also feature in Japanese woodblock prints — Hokusai's manga drawings of crabs were well known to Van Gogh. The crab on its back is both an observation and an image — a small creature in its most vulnerable position, a detail that several scholars have read as quietly autobiographical given the turbulence of Van Gogh's Paris period. This was the same year that he began the intensive colour experiments with Signac and Bernard at Asnières, and his Paris studio was producing works across a remarkable range of subject and scale. Now at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

The crab is painted with careful observation of its shell's mottled orange, red, and purple tones, rendered with short, curved strokes that follow the structure of the carapace. The light background is built up with loose, varied colour marks, giving the whole composition an immediacy characteristic of Van Gogh's Paris-period studies.