The Potato Eaters

English

The Potato Eaters: Vincent van Gogh

Price: Price on Request
Art Type: Oil Painting
Size:
English Comments: 0
International Comments: 0
Creating Date:
Introduction and Works of Vincent van Gogh >>

Contemporary-Art.org

Reproduction

Enlarge

Vincent van Gogh Oil Painting - The Potato Eaters

Keywords: Potato, Eaters

Work Overview: Artist Vincent van Gogh
Year 1885
Catalog F82 JH764
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions 82 cm × 114 cm (32.3 in × 44.9 in)
Location Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

The Potato Eaters (Dutch: De Aardappeleters) is an oil painting by Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh painted in April 1885 in Nuenen, Netherlands.[1] It is in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. A preliminary oil sketch of the painting is at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, and he also made lithographs of the image, which are held in collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The painting is considered to be one of Van Gogh's masterpieces.

During March and the beginning of April 1885 he sketched studies for the painting, and corresponded with his brother Theo, who was not impressed with his current work or the sketches Van Gogh sent him in Paris.[4] He worked on the painting from April 13 until the beginning of May, when it was mostly done except for minor changes which he made with a small brush later the same year.

Van Gogh said he wanted to depict peasants as they really were. He deliberately chose coarse and ugly models, thinking that they would be natural and unspoiled in his finished work: "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."[5]

Writing to his sister Willemina two years later in Paris, Van Gogh still considered The Potato Eaters his most successful painting: "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".[6] However, the work was criticized by his friend Anthon van Rappard soon after it was painted. This was a blow to Van Gogh's confidence as an emerging artist, and he wrote back to his friend, "you...had no right to condemn my work in the way you did" (July 1885), and later, "I am always doing what I can't do yet in order to learn how to do it." (August 1885).

-----------------------------------
Van Gogh saw the Potato Eaters as a showpiece, for which he deliberately chose a difficult composition to prove he was on his way to becoming a good figure painter. The painting had to depict the harsh reality of country life, so he gave the peasants coarse faces and bony, working hands. He wanted to show in this way that they ‘have tilled the earth themselves with these hands they are putting in the dish ... that they have thus honestly earned their food’.

He painted the five figures in earth colours – ‘something like the colour of a really dusty potato, unpeeled of course’. The message of the painting was more important to Van Gogh than correct anatomy or technical perfection. He was very pleased with the result: yet his painting drew considerable criticism because its colours were so dark and the figures full of mistakes. Nowadays, the Potato Eaters is one of Van Gogh’s most famous works.

-------------------------------------
Van Gogh saw the Potato Eaters as a showpiece, for which he deliberately chose a difficult composition to prove he was on his way to becoming a good figure painter. The painting had to depict the harsh reality of country life, so he gave the peasants coarse faces and bony, working hands. He wanted to show in this way that they ‘have tilled the earth themselves with these hands they are putting in the dish ... that they have thus honestly earned their food’.

He painted the five figures in earth colours – ‘something like the colour of a really dusty potato, unpeeled of course’. The message of the painting was more important to Van Gogh than correct anatomy or technical perfection. He was very pleased with the result: yet his painting drew considerable criticism because its colours were so dark and the figures full of mistakes. Nowadays, the Potato Eaters is one of Van Gogh’s most famous works.

Above everything is the cartoonish red and yellow flame of the oil lamp creating a pool of warmth within the cavernous, mineral-grey space that represents night, terror, the cold world. For all their community, these people are aware of the harshness of their lives; the man on the left is lost in thought, as is the woman pouring coffee. They might be thinking of injustice.

The Potato Eaters is Van Gogh's first ambitious painting, in which he synthesises his ideas about art and society: he conceived it as a painting not only of peasants, but for peasants. And yet Van Gogh was never a prosaic realist; he had a charged sense of painting as visual ecstasy. In his letter to Theo explaining this painting, he elaborates his theory of colour, comparing his scintillating combinations to the ones weavers use.

Van Gogh never abandoned his belief in a humble art. The rustic aesthetic he imposed on The Yellow House in Arles belongs recognisably to the same world as The Potato Eaters. Look at the wooden straw-seated chair of the peasant on the far left: it is the kind immortalised by his 1888 painting Van Gogh's Chair.

-----------------------------------------
The peasants' gnarled hands and fingers evince severe arthritic pain, while the folds and wrinkles in their tattered clothing seem to restrain some unwieldy, internal force. On the wall, the Crucifixion picture and clock seem poised to jump off the wall rather than to remain attached.

This explosive energy is a heartfelt but unsentimental contrast to its solemnity and tranquility, in which these peasants have nothing but coffee and potatoes to eat after a physically taxing day.

He was pleased with Potato Eaters, writing to Theo that

...in contrast to a great many other paintings, it has rusticity and a certain life in it. And then, although it's done differently, in a different century from the old Dutchmen, Ostade, for instance, it's nevertheless out of the heart of peasant life and - original.

Tragically, his painting career was intermittently interrupted by an unspecifiable mental illness; the physician who admitted him to a psychiatric hospital in 1888 noted that his patient had "acute mania with hallucinations of sight and hearing." His failure to achieve financial stability was profoundly troubling - in spite of the exclusivity of van Gogh artwork today, some art historians claim he sold only one painting, Red Vineyard at Arles, during his lifetime; further, he had no patrons, and he was forced to remain financially dependent on Theo.

Copyright Statement:
All the reproduction of any forms about this work unauthorized by Singing Palette including images, texts and so on will be deemed to be violating the Copyright Laws.
To cite this webpage, please link back here.

>> English Comments >> Chinese Comments >> French Comments >> German Comments >>Report

Vincent van Gogh

Work Overview