Vincent Van Gogh, Potato Eaters

Vincent Van Gogh, Potato Eaters

Living a marginal life in the Netherlands while teaching himself to draw and paint, he rejected bourgeois portrait art and romantic narrative in favor of a raw study of nature and the peasants eking a living from the harsh cold soil. On the eve of discovering Impressionism, Van Gogh saw himself as a painter of peasant life - a popular alternative to the urban painter Flaneur, characterized by Baudelaire as a painter of modern life. To Theo, he wrote: "By continually observing peasant life at all hours of the day," he said, "I became so absorbed in it that I hardly think of anything else."

This painting emerged from the peasant portrait work Van Gogh did in and around Nuenen. Their faces and hands are large, earthy, as if made from the soil they till. Their simple evening meal is sacred; they are serious, determined, and somewhat excited as if deriving more pleasure and social sharing from this meal of potatoes and coffee than from the sumptuous feast of a rich man.

The eyes of the young woman, presumably looking at her husband, are extraordinary. There is admiration in them; Van Gogh implies that these people are sexually alive despite all their back-breaking efforts. There is also a connection between the old couple on the right. The girl with her back turned to us completes the circle around the table.

Above all, there is the caricatured red and yellow flame of the lantern creating a pool of warmth in the cavernous space representing the night, terror, and the cold world. For all their community, these people are aware of the harshness of their lives; the man on the left, like the woman pouring coffee, is deep in thought. They might be contemplating injustice.

The Potato Eaters is the first ambitious painting in which Van Gogh synthesized his ideas about art and society: he designed it not only as a painting of peasants but also as a painting by peasants. But Van Gogh was never an ordinary realist; he had a sense of painting charged with visual ecstasy. In the letter explaining this painting to Theo, he detailed his color theory, comparing his own brilliant combinations to those used by weavers.

Van Gogh never abandoned his belief in humble art. The rustic aesthetic he imposed on The Yellow House in Arles is recognizably of the same world as The Potato Eaters. Look at the wooden chair with a wicker seat of the peasant on the far left: It is of the kind immortalized by Van Gogh's Chair from 1888.

The dark atmosphere and spiritual depth of this painting recall Rembrandt, one of Van Gogh's favorite painters.