The Potato Eaters

In a dimly lit room, a dining table is illuminated by lamplight.
Peasants gather together, reaching for steaming potatoes.

Heavily distorted faces.
Knobby, awkward hands.
Looking at these crude, rough brushstrokes, one might assume
that it was dashed off on a whim right beside their table,
or perhaps that the artist simply lacked the skill to render them correctly.

Yet in truth, that could not be further from the case.
This painting was the culmination of over a hundred studies produced across a single winter.
Born of meticulous planning, it was his very first major work.

The year was 1885.
Vincent van Gogh was living in Nuenen, in the Netherlands.
At 32 years of age, five years had passed since he decided to teach himself how to paint.
With no means of earning an income of his own,
he relied entirely on remittances sent by his younger brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris.
To afford painting supplies, he went so far as to cut back on his own food.
Neglect and poor nutrition had ruined his teeth and wrecked his health.

In March, his father Theodorus died suddenly.
Amid family friction and grief,
his isolation deepened, yet he resolved to prove his true worth:
by creating an ambitious multi-figure composition that could hold its own in the Parisian art market.

The setting was the nearby village of Gerwen,
the cottage of an actual tenant farming family, the De Groots.
From dawn until dusk, they toiled in harsh wetland fields.
Their staple diet consisted of nothing more than homegrown potatoes and weak grain coffee.
Day after day, Van Gogh frequented this modest cottage.

Gordina de Groot, the young woman seated at the back right of the composition—
he produced more than forty studies of her head alone.
Day in, day out, he tirelessly observed the faces and hands of these laborers.

Then, in late April,
he secluded himself in his studio to complete the final canvas, weaving together memory and imagination.
It was proof that he had matured into an accomplished figure painter—
a work in which he took absolute pride.

Seeking their appraisal, he sent the canvas to Theo in Paris,
and dispatched a lithograph to his close friend, the painter Anthon van Rappard.