Still life with buckling and garlic-onion

Van Gogh's 1887 still life of buckling (smoked herring) and garlic-onion, now at the Artizon Museum in Tokyo, belongs to the specific category of Dutch food still life that he cultivated throughout his Paris period as a deliberate statement about the legitimate subjects of art. Garlic and smoked fish — the most pungent, most working-class of kitchen ingredients — were as far as possible from the elaborate fruit arrangements and game birds of Dutch Golden Age still life, and Van Gogh chose them precisely for that distance from convention. He was making a point that the food of the poor deserved the same serious artistic attention as the food of the rich, and this combination of dried fish and the sharp tang of garlic onion was a subject Chardin would never have painted. The Artizon Museum (formerly the Bridgestone Museum), one of Japan's most distinguished private museums in Tokyo's Kyobashi district, holds a remarkable collection of Western modernism alongside its Japanese work. The Japanese collecting tradition for French Post-Impressionism began in the early twentieth century with industrialists who saw in Impressionist painting an aesthetic aligned with Japanese sensitivity to natural beauty and craft, and the Artizon's Van Gogh holdings reflect that long engagement. The still life's modest scale and humble subject make it characteristic of Van Gogh's Paris period: works made rapidly, almost as notes, rather than as finished exhibitions.

The buckling and garlic-onion are rendered with Van Gogh's characteristic directness — preserved fish and the bulbous garlic form observed with the same seriousness as any other subject. His Paris palette brings more chromatic nuance than his Dutch period would have. The composition is simple and direct, the food items themselves the entire subject without decorative elaboration.