The Potato Eaters by Van Gogh

Oil on canvas, 32 x 44.5 inches, it was painted at Nuenen in May 1885. The Potato Eaters was one of van Gogh’s first paintings and posthumously, one of the most popular.

Van Gogh said he wanted to depict peasants as ‘they really were’. He deliberately chose coarse and unattractive models, believing they would be natural and unspoiled in his finished work.

It shows five people eating potatoes around a dinner table. The painting is quite dark, which contrast with many of van Gogh’s later brighter works.

No one in the painting has a happy expression on his face or her faces, and they look thin and bony. Their clothes are ragged and dirty; generally, they look like friends or family that has been working hard all day.
The Potato Eaters by Van Gogh 

Vincent Van Gogh, “The Potato Eaters,” 1885

Van Gogh’s first major work, “The Potato Eaters,” was painted in dark earth tones, a stark contrast from the hues in his later landscapes. Its aim was to capture the grim realities of peasant life.

The Potato Easters was painted in the village of Nuenen, where van Gogh’s parent had lived since 1883. Vicnet lived there for two years – 1884 and 1885. At that time he had already done 250 drawings and 190 paintings.

The Potato Eaters

He sent the Potato Eaters to his brother Theo into Paris. Van Gogh said he wanted to depict peasants as ‘they really were’.  He deliberately chose coarse and unattractive models, believing they would be natural and unspoiled in his finished work.

Van Gogh conceived the painting, as its scale and compositional ambition indicate, as a masterpiece in the strict sense: a demonstration of his artistic coming-of-age following a self –directed apprenticeship that had begun in 1881.

Writing to his sister Willemina two years later, van Gogh still considered The Potato Eaters his most successful panting.
Vincent Van Gogh, “The Potato Eaters,” 1885