Vincent van Gogh The Potato Eaters April 1885 oil on canvas Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

After his productive period in The Hague, Van Gogh decided to spend some time with his father and mother, who were then living at the vicarage in Nuenen, a village in the eastern part of the province of North Brabant. He spent nearly two years with them, from 1883 to 1885. In Nuenen he began to create works that, to a certain extent, look back toward the early explorations of peasant life he had made in the Borinage. But now Van Gogh has grown as an artist, and his goals and ideas are more clearly defined. His continued admiration for Millet is plain in the subjects he depicts.

The Potato Eaters is not only the most famous work from the Nuenen period but one of the most famous paintings produced by Van Gogh during his lifetime. Its creation consumed the artist for many months. In fact, he wrote his brother Theo that he had spent an entire winter painting studies of the heads and hands. He produced between forty and fifty such studies for this painting -- following the tradition of working from preparatory studies to create a large, ambitious piece intended for public exhibition.

In this work Van Gogh accentuated the grim reality and drabness of peasant life. He used a dark, somber palette and confined the figures within a small, dim room. His brushstrokes are harsh, dense, and thick. This is not a graceful painting; its brutality reflects the artist's uncompromising approach to the subject. Yet there is an aura of sanctity in the friezelike arrangement of figures at the table, as if in a kind of secular celebration of the Last Supper. For this ambitious painting, Van Gogh in fact drew upon a wide range of sources, from engravings in illustrated newspapers and paintings by Dutch artists such as Jozef Israëls to the evocative portrait types of Honoré Daumier and Millet. One can even discern echoes of the dramatic rendering of light and shadow found in the work of Rembrandt.

Reverence tempers the picture's grimy qualities. Van Gogh respects these people and understands their suffering. In explaining the painting to Theo, he said "what I have tried to do is convey the idea that these people eating their potatoes by lamplight have dug from the earth with the very hands they put into their bowls. Thus the painting is about manual labor and about the fact that they've earned their food honestly."

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