Beer Tankards

Beer Tankards (1885), at the Van Gogh Museum, is one of the still lifes Van Gogh produced alongside his peasant figure paintings during his Nuenen period. The earthenware beer tankard was a distinctly Dutch object—associated with guild culture, tavern life, and the Flemish and Dutch still-life tradition going back to the Golden Age. By painting tankards, Van Gogh was consciously situating himself within that tradition while subjecting it to his more sombre, morally engaged approach. The objects' dark, matte surfaces gave him an opportunity to explore the tonal painting he was developing in preparation for the figure subjects he considered his primary work.

The earthenware tankards' dark, matte surfaces absorb rather than reflect light, requiring Van Gogh to work with subtle tonal variations within a very limited tonal range. His brushwork builds the forms through directional marks that follow the cylindrical structure of the vessels. The dark ground against which they are set creates a brooding, low-contrast tonal environment characteristic of his Dutch period still lifes.