Still Life with mackerel, lemon and tomato

This 1886 still life of mackerel, lemon, and tomatoes is among the most programmatic of Van Gogh's Paris period color exercises — the three objects chosen with evident care for the specific color relationships they would demonstrate on the canvas. The silvery blue-gray of the mackerel against the yellow lemon against the red tomatoes creates a triangle of color primaries and their variations that reads almost like a practical demonstration of the Delacroix color theory Van Gogh was studying. He had been reading the accounts of Delacroix's method and was particularly interested in the French Romantic master's insistence on simultaneous contrast — the way colors modify each other when placed adjacently on the canvas rather than blended. Chardin's seventeenth-century kitchen still lifes provided the precedent for treating such humble food as legitimate artistic subject matter, and Van Gogh's Paris period still lifes consistently invoke that tradition while subjecting it to the new lessons of Impressionist color. The Museum Am Römerholz at Winterthur — a distinguished Swiss private museum — preserves this alongside the Courtyard of the Hospital at Arles as evidence of the collecting tradition that brought significant Van Gogh works to Switzerland early in the twentieth century.

Van Gogh stages the fish, lemon, and tomatoes on a plain surface without decorative framing. The silvery blue-grey of the mackerel plays against the lemon's yellow and the tomatoes' red in carefully considered color oppositions. Brushwork is loose but responsive, adapting to the surface quality of each object.