The Potato Eaters
Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890) · April to May 1885
Five members of a peasant family sit around a table in a dark cottage, eating potatoes with their fingers and pouring coffee, lit by a single oil lamp hanging from the beam. The faces are coarse and heavy, the hands are large, and the whole room is painted in browns and greens the colour of earth and smoke. Vincent painted it in the village of Nuenen in the spring of 1885, and he thought of it as his first real picture, the one that would prove he was a painter and not just a man who drew.
He made dozens of studies of heads and hands beforehand, and you can see that the figures were assembled from these rather than posed together. Look at the way the lamplight catches the edges of noses, knuckles and the steam over the dish, and at the greenish glow on the faces, which he compared to the colour of a dusty unpeeled potato. He wanted the painting to smell of bacon, smoke and potato steam, as he put it, and to show that these people had earned their food honestly with the same hands they now put in the dish. It is deliberately ugly by the standards of the time, and that was the point.
Theo and Vincent's painter friend Anthon van Rappard both criticised the drawing, and Vincent was hurt for months. He took the canvas with him to Paris, then left it there, and it stayed in the family. In the museum's chronological hang it is the dark starting point from which everything that follows explodes into colour, and it helps to remember that the same man painted this and the sunflowers only four years apart. Notice the little clock and the crucifix on the wall behind the woman on the right, the only decorations in the room.
Did You Know? Vincent hoped to sell a lithograph of the scene and printed it himself, but he only ever gave away a handful of copies.
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