Prawns and Mussels

Among the more unusual still-life subjects Van Gogh chose during his Paris period, this 1886 study of prawns and mussels at the Van Gogh Museum reflects both his democratic approach to subject matter and his engagement with the Dutch tradition of fish and shellfish still life that ran from seventeenth-century examples through the nineteenth century. He was also making a conscious point about what painting was for: where Impressionist flower still lifes cultivated a certain bourgeois prettiness, shellfish on a kitchen surface spoke directly of the actual daily nourishment of working people. The technical challenge of rendering the different textures — prawn segments, mussel shells, their contrasting surface qualities — was also genuine: no two objects in the arrangement presented the same material or chromatic problem, and working through all of them required the full range of the observational skills he was developing. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

The different textures of prawns and mussels are distinguished through contrasting brushwork: the prawns' segmented shells built up in layered strokes of pink and orange, the mussels' smooth surfaces rendered more flatly with subtle blue-grey iridescence. The interplay of organic forms creates an informal compositional arrangement.