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Location: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Van Gogh’s post impressionism first reared its head, when he began painting peasant scenes during his stay in Drenthe in 1883. After that he moved to Nuenen in Brabant, where he produced more than a hundred portrait studies of local farm labourers.
“The Potato Eaters” was painted in 1885 in Nuenen in the Netherlands.
Van Gogh’s objective was to show peasants as they really were. A group eating potatoes in the evening to the light of a single oil lamp. One can feel the harshness of life creeping in through the frame, the mood sombre, the colours muted, the figures devoid of any glamour. A scintillating fold of canvas, celebrating the value of manual labour and the virtues of honesty.
There is almost a forced intent to not add beauty to the scene in anyway. It’s a stark depiction of real life contrasting with Van Goghs other landscapes.
In Van Gogh’s own words, “You see, I really have wanted to make it so that people get the idea that these folk, who are eating their potatoes by the light of their little lamp, have tilled the earth themselves with these hands they are putting in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labor and that they have thus honestly earned their food. I wanted it to give the idea of a wholly different way of life from ours, civilized people. So I certainly don’t want everyone just to admire it or approve of it without knowing why.”
Later in life he wrote a letter to his sister, where he confessed that in his belief, this was among his personal favourite’s —
“What I think about my own work is that the painting of the peasants eating potatoes that I did in Nuenen is after all the best thing I did.”
The painting was drawn in the home of the De Groot-van Rooij family, the family who modelled for him. It was not Van Gogh’s intention to portray them exactly. What he was concerned about was conveying the atmosphere and primitiveness of peasant life.
The Potato Eaters, has been stolen twice. In 1989, thieves stole an early version of the work from the Kroller-Muller Museum, along with the artist’s “Weavers’s Interior” and “Dried Sunflowers.” The final version of “The Potato Eaters” was part of a group of 20 artworks stolen from The Vincent Van Gogh Museum in 1991. Both versions have since been recovered.
