Vincent van Gogh painted what he considered his first masterpiece, The Potato Eaters, in the Brabant village of Nuenen in 1885. He wanted his figure painting to express the harshness of rural life, while simultaneously showing the world what he had to offer as an artist.
Working in the artistic tradition of ‘the meagre meal’, Van Gogh painted a peasant family in a poorly lit room in which two moments of communal eating are combined: koffiedrinken (literally ‘coffee-drinking’), which was a light meal with bread at around six in the evening, and a simple meal of potatoes left over from midday, eaten around nine. Various members of the De Groot family posed for the painting, for which Van Gogh used a dark palette of earth colours and gave the figures weatherbeaten faces and coarse, bony hands. Several objects can be seen on the wall behind them, including a framed colour print with a ‘household blessing’.
Kees Rovers, who lives in Nuenen, has been collecting objects that appear in Van Gogh’s Brabant paintings for some time now and he recently acquired two different household blessings. Which one was it, though, that Vincent depicted? The historian and ethnologist Gerard Rooijakkers decided to find out and has been able to show that it was a devotional print from the pilgrimage site of Kevelaer. In this article he describes the significance of household blessings in Brabant Catholic culture.