Still Life with Ginger Jar and Onions

Van Gogh's Still Life with Ginger Jar and Onions (1885) at the McMaster Museum of Art belongs to his systematic study of the domestic objects of the Dutch peasant kitchen — the specific ceramic vessels and food items that formed the material world of the Nuenen community he was documenting. The ginger jar — a common stoneware storage vessel used for preserved ginger or other condiments — and the onions beside it create exactly the kind of humble kitchen arrangement that Chardin had elevated in the eighteenth century, and Van Gogh was consciously working in that tradition. He described to Theo his interest in Dutch seventeenth-century still-life painting as a model for treating humble subjects with artistic seriousness, finding in Chardin's kitchen objects the most convincing argument that greatness in still life did not require expensive or elaborate subjects. The McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton, Ontario, holds this work within a distinguished university art collection that spans several centuries of European and North American painting. The onions and ginger jar are rendered with careful attention to their specific material qualities — the glazed ceramic's warmth against the matte skin of onions — demonstrating Van Gogh's increasing technical confidence in the late Nuenen period.

The still life is rendered with the dark, earthy Nuenen palette: the specific warm brown of a stoneware ginger jar, the papery outer layers and firm body of onions, the dark ground that surrounds them. Van Gogh pays careful attention to the different surface qualities — the glazed ceramic's slight reflectiveness, the matte skin of onions — rendered through distinct brushwork approaches. The composition is simple and direct, without the elaborate spatial constructions of traditional Dutch still life, focusing all attention on the objects themselves.