Still life with buckling and garlic-onion

Van Gogh's 1887 still life with buckling (smoked herring) and garlic onion, now at the Artizon Museum in Tokyo, belongs to his Paris period still lifes of working-class food. The combination of preserved fish and garlic — pungent, earthy, fundamentally practical — reflects his ongoing identification with the food of the poor and his rejection of elevated still-life subjects in favor of the humble and necessary. The Artizon Museum (formerly the Bridgestone Museum) in Tokyo holds a distinguished collection of Western and Japanese modernism.

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.