Still Life with Two Herrings, a Cloth and a Glass

The 1886 still life of two herrings with a cloth and a glass represents Van Gogh at the beginning of his transformative Paris period, when the dark Nuenen palette was beginning to lighten and the lessons of Impressionist color were starting to penetrate his work. The combination of objects — fish, cloth, glass — creates the kind of color and texture exercise he was using still-life painting to conduct: the silvery fish against the fabric's softer tones against the glass's transparency. He had been studying Chardin's kitchen still lifes in the Louvre and finding in them both a precedent for treating humble food with artistic seriousness and a specific technical lesson in how to render different materials with different paint handling. The glass, in particular, was a traditional still-life challenge — its transparency requiring the painter to show what is behind and within it simultaneously — and Van Gogh's treatment here shows him working through this problem with the directness of someone learning by doing. The American holding (noted as 'United States' in the catalogue) reflects the widespread dispersal of his Paris period still lifes through the twentieth-century art market, many of which passed through New York dealers to American private and institutional collections before systematic cataloguing established their significance.

Van Gogh arranges the two fish diagonally across the canvas with the cloth and glass providing compositional support. The silvery-blue skin of the herrings is rendered with careful attention to their reflective surface quality. The palette is lighter than his Dutch work, with greater attention to the interplay of reflected light and surface texture.