The Potato Eaters

What you are looking at

Five people sit around a small table in a dark cottage, under the light of a single oil lamp hanging from the beams. Four of them reach into a shared dish of steaming potatoes with their fingers or forks; at the right, an older woman pours coffee from a kettle into cups. A young girl, seen from behind, is a dark silhouette against the light. The faces are coarse and bony, with heavy noses, protruding cheekbones and big knuckled hands.

The color is almost all earth: browns, dull greens and smoky grays, the lamplight a dull yellow glow rather than a blaze. On the back wall hang a clock and a small framed print of the Crucifixion. The ceiling is low, the space cramped, and the figures are pressed close to one another and to us. Nobody smiles, but their glances cross the table, and the meal is shared.

Who were the potato eaters?

The family were the De Groots, cottagers in Nuenen, the village in North Brabant where Van Gogh's father was the Protestant pastor and where Vincent lived from 1883 to 1885. They worked the land and wove. Gordina de Groot, the young woman on the left, was one of Van Gogh's regular models, and several of the faces are based on members of her family. Van Gogh painted dozens of peasant heads and hands over the winter of 1884–85 to prepare for this composition.

How Van Gogh made it

The Potato Eaters was Van Gogh's first major figure painting, made when he had been painting for less than five years. He painted a preliminary oil sketch, now in the Kröller-Müller Museum, and then this final version in his studio, working partly from memory, in April and early May 1885. He also made a lithograph of the composition, which reverses the image.

He chose the colors deliberately. He wrote to his brother Theo that the faces should have the color of a really dusty potato, unpeeled of course. He wanted the painting to smell of bacon, smoke and potato steam, not of perfume, and to be true to peasant life rather than pretty. His heroes were Jean-François Millet, the painter of French rural labor, and the Hague School painters of the Dutch countryside.

What does The Potato Eaters mean?

Van Gogh explained his intention directly in a letter to Theo of April 1885. He said he had tried to make it clear that the people eating potatoes by lamplight had dug the earth with the same hands they were putting into the dish, so that the picture spoke of manual labor and of food honestly earned. The coarseness was the point: he was painting a moral truth about work, not an ideal of beauty.

The details support that reading. The crucifix print, the bare table and the single dish suggest a pious, frugal household; the communal meal recalls religious images of sharing bread. The darkness is not gloom but evening after a day's work. Compare Henry Ossawa Tanner's later The Thankful Poor, which gives a similar subject a gentler light.

Reception and legacy

The painting was not well received. Van Gogh's friend, the painter Anthon van Rappard, criticized the lithograph harshly, mocking the figures' anatomy and the artist's ambitions; the exchange ended their friendship. Theo could not sell it. Van Gogh nonetheless remained proud of the work. Even after moving to Paris and adopting bright color, he wrote in 1887 that it was still, after all, the best thing he had done.

Today it is one of the most famous early works by any modern painter, and the clearest proof of how far Van Gogh traveled between 1885 and 1890, from the dark interiors of Brabant to the blazing yellows of Sunflowers and Café Terrace at Night. His painting of worn workman's boots, A Pair of Shoes, continues the same concern with labor and poverty.

Details most viewers miss

• The clock. The clock on the back wall, just visible, marks the evening hour after work.
• The hands. Van Gogh made studies of peasants' hands for months; in the painting they are almost as large as the faces.
• The steam. A faint wisp of steam rises from the potatoes, painted with a few lighter strokes.
• The girl in silhouette. The child seen from behind blocks part of the light, making the lamp glow more strongly around her outline.

Where to see The Potato Eaters

The final version hangs in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, usually in the opening galleries devoted to his Dutch period. The oil sketch is at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, and impressions of the lithograph are in several collections. A visit to Nuenen, where a museum center and walking routes trace his years there, adds context.