Still Life: Bloaters on a Piece of Yellow Paper

Van Gogh's Still Life: Bloaters on a Piece of Yellow Paper from 1889, painted at Saint-Rémy, returns to the subject of smoked fish he had explored in Paris. The yellow paper beneath the fish creates a striking chromatic base that connects this still life to his Arles-period interest in yellow as a compositional organizing color. Bloaters — smoked whole herring — carry associations with the Dutch working-class diet he grew up with, and their reappearance in the Saint-Rémy period suggests a nostalgia for both the north and the ordinary pleasures of daily life. The work is currently in a private collection.

The bloaters on yellow paper create a strong chromatic contrast — the silvery fish against the vivid yellow of the paper beneath. Van Gogh's Saint-Rémy technique handles the fish with direct observation while the yellow paper is rendered with flat, intense color. The composition is simple and frontal, the chromatic relationship between fish and paper its primary interest.