Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters

Living at his parents’ house in Nuenen, Van Gogh painted a peasant family eating potatoes by lamplight — his first major work, in dark colours.

After working as an art dealer’s clerk, a teacher and a preacher in a mining district, Vincent van Gogh decided in 1880, at 27, to become an artist. At the end of 1883 he came to Nuenen in the south of the Netherlands, where his father was the pastor, and drew and painted peasants and weavers at work again and again.

The Potato Eaters, painted in April–May 1885, shows a peasant family sharing potatoes they had dug themselves by lamplight, in dark, rough colours. He wrote to his brother Theo that he wanted to show that the people eating had dug the earth with the very hands they put in the dish. Criticised at the time, it is now counted his first masterpiece.