Still Life with Earthenware and Bottles

Still Life with Earthenware and Bottles (1885), at the Van Gogh Museum, is another of Van Gogh's Nuenen period still lifes assembled from the utilitarian objects of everyday kitchen and household life. The combination of earthenware—with its rough, matt, opaque surface—and glass bottles—with their transparency and reflectivity—gave him two contrasting material challenges within a single composition. This kind of careful material selection connecting to a tradition going back to Chardin and the Dutch Golden Age, in which the painter's skill was demonstrated through the simultaneous rendering of fundamentally different surface qualities.

Glass and earthenware require entirely different technical approaches: the glass demands attention to reflections, transparency, and the distorted view of objects seen through it; the earthenware demands a stable, matter-of-fact paint surface that reads as opaque and unreflective. Van Gogh addresses both challenges in a composition whose tonal unity is maintained by the dark background and limited colour range of his Dutch period.