Still Life with Ginger Jar and Apples

Still Life with Ginger Jar and Apples (1885) belongs to Van Gogh's systematic Nuenen still-life programme, pairing a stoneware ginger jar with apples in an arrangement that juxtaposed the matt opacity of ceramic with the smoother, more varied surface of fruit. The ginger jar was a specific type of Dutch domestic pottery — salt-glazed stoneware with a characteristic shoulder shape — that appeared frequently in seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes and that Van Gogh used as an anchor for several of his kitchen arrangements. He was working consciously within the seventeenth-century tradition while insisting on the contemporary reality of his specific objects: not antique props or collector's pieces but the actual household pottery of a working-class Dutch family. Current location unknown.

The ginger jar's ceramic surface provides tonal variety — its glaze catching light differently than the fruit alongside it. Van Gogh models the forms with careful attention to their roundness and weight. The dark background maximizes contrast with the lit surfaces, a technique learned from Dutch Old Master still life.