The drinker

Painted in 1868 and held at the Kunstmuseum Bern, this early canvas confronts alcoholism — a social problem that afflicted Swiss rural communities as much as urban ones in the mid-nineteenth century. Anker's subject matter was generally celebratory of Swiss peasant virtue, but he did not flinch from depicting its failures. Alcoholism was a recognised problem in the Bernese Mittelland: Reformed Protestant culture condemned excess drinking, temperance movements were active in Switzerland by the 1860s, and the degradation of a drinker within a tight-knit village community would have been publicly visible and morally charged. To depict such a figure with sympathy rather than caricature required moral seriousness, and Anker's academic training equipped him for this: he could render deterioration, vacancy, and the physical signs of chronic drinking with clinical observation without descending to moralising grotesque. The Kunstmuseum Bern's acquisition underlines the work's reception as a serious social painting rather than a curiosity.

Anker renders the physical signs of chronic alcoholism through careful observation: reddened skin tones built from warm underpainting with cooler surface glazes, a certain laxness in the musculature of face and posture, and eyes that refuse sustained focus. These effects required physiognomic study distinct from his usual subjects — portrait-level attention to the particular deterioration rather than generic social type.