Stillleben: Neuer Weisswein und Nüsse

This 1896 canvas by Albert Anker belongs to what was one of his most concentrated production years for still-life painting. The mid-1890s saw Anker return repeatedly to tabletop arrangements, producing a series of works ranging from the moralising Excess and Moderateness pair to more straightforward object studies. The year 1896 also saw him working on his painting The Village School in 1848, suggesting a remarkable range of ambition — from intimate tabletop observation to large-scale social-historical composition. This canvas, whatever its specific subject, participates in the broader project of Anker's late career: a sustained meditation on the material culture and daily life of a Switzerland that was beginning to change rapidly under industrial and urban pressure.

The 1896 date places this work in Anker's most technically accomplished late phase. His paint application by this point was completely automatic in the best sense — no technical problem presented difficulties, only pictorial ones. The result is surfaces of remarkable refinement achieved without visible effort, the mark of a painter who has absorbed his training so completely that method no longer intrudes between observation and execution.