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When you look at The Potato Eaters, the painting seems to be made up mostly of grey-brown-greenish colours. Slightly muddy tones, all more or less the same. But Van Gogh had to use a whole lot of different colours to achieve them.
He read about ‘broken tones’ in a textbook, which explained about mixing two complementary colours (ones that intensify each other). Red and green, for instance, or orange and blue. If you mix them in equal amounts, you get grey. If the quantities aren’t the same, you end up with a colour with a greyish tint. Grey-pink, say, or grey-green like we find in the cap of one of the women. Van Gogh hoped in this way to achieve a colourful effect in a dark painting. So there’s a lot more colour here than you might think!
Detail of: Vincent van Gogh, The Potato Eaters, 1885
Colour wheel, Charles Blanc, 1867.
Around three months before working on The Potato Eaters, Van Gogh made a portrait of one of the rural folk who would later appear in the painting: the elderly man with the cup in his hand. It shows that he had known the family for some time.
The De Groot family consisted of the mother Cornelia (maiden name Van Rooij) and her children Hendrik, Peter and Gordina. Cornelia’s sister and two brothers also lived in the little ‘semi-detached’ cottage. Vincent drew and painted Gordina (1855–1927) on several occasions and we know for certain that she also appears in The Potato Eaters. He continued to think about the family even after he left Nuenen. ‘It would please me if you would write and tell me […] how they’re doing at De Groot’s’, he wrote to his sister Willemien (from Paris, October 1887).
Vincent van Gogh, Head of a Man, 1885
Vincent van Gogh, Head of a Woman (Gordina de Groot), 1885
Vincent van Gogh, The Potato Eaters, 1885. The two figures in the middle are similar to the sketches he made.
Van Gogh had big ambitions for The Potato Eaters: he hoped that the painting would be his ticket out of obscurity and into the Parisian art world. Vincent the peasant painter! With this in mind, he prepared especially thoroughly.
He made not one but two painted preliminary studies before embarking on the final work. There are four people in the first study, in which Van Gogh focused on the effects of light and shadow and did not yet concern himself with the details.
He added a fifth person in the second study. Can you spot any other differences? The dish of potatoes has been shifted to the left and the people on the right have been given coffee bowls and a coffee pot. In this way, the painting became steadily more elaborate.
Vincent van Gogh, Study for 'The Potato Eaters', 1885
Vincent van Gogh (1853 - 1890), The Potato Eaters, 1885. Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo.
It’s so dark in the potato eaters’ cottage that you might not notice straight away that there’s a clock hanging on the wall on the left. If you look closely, you can see that it’s seven o’clock in the evening: time for dinner! Potatoes were eaten throughout the day in that period, whether fried, in a stew or in sandwiches. The ones here are freshly boiled – you can see the steam coming off them.
There are other ‘hidden’ details in the painting too: a religious print hangs alongside the clock to bless the house and a clog containing cutlery is fixed to the side of the fireplace. There are sausages too, smoking above the hearth, although these are harder to make out. The back of the chair on the left actually has ‘Vincent’ written on it, but this is no longer visible as the paint has darkened.
Detail from a brightened version of The Potato Eaters in which details like the clock and print are visible.
Detail from a brightened version of The Potato Eaters in which the clog, cutlery and sausages are visible.
Detail from a brightened and black-and-white version of The Potato Eaters in which you can see a hint of the signature of Vincent on the back of the chair.
Van Gogh hoped that The Potato Eaters would bring him success. He was convinced that he had produced a peasant painting that was truly ‘felt’. Even before the work was complete, he made a lithograph of it so that his brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris, could start promoting the painting. His artist friend Anthon van Rappard received a copy of the print too.
But the response was not what Vincent had hoped: Theo found it too gloomy for a Paris where the colourful art of the Impressionists was the ‘in thing’. The harshest criticism, however, came from Van Rappard, who thought that the figures were a technical failure. ‘And why may that man on the right not have a knee [...] And why must his arm be a metre too short? [...] And why must the woman on the left have a sort of little pipe stem with a cube on it for a nose?’ (from Utrecht, May 1885)
Van Gogh did not have much experience with lithography and made a beginner's mistake. When printing, the image is mirrored and he had not taken that into account. (Vincent van Gogh, The Potato Eaters, 1885)
In 1890, five years after completing The Potato Eaters, Van Gogh was living in France. He had been admitted to a psychiatric clinic in Saint-Rémy and was lonely and missed his family. He often thought about his native country and his time in Nuenen and even considered making a new version of The Potato Eaters.
Van Gogh asked his family to send him the peasant drawings he had left behind. Between March and April 1890, he created new sketches of peasant figures around a table. But very different to what he’d done in 1885! He worked now with strong lines and hatching (closely spaced lines). In technical terms, the poses and proportions of the figures are a lot more natural. Sadly, they were never translated into a painted version in colour.
Vincent van Gogh, Interior with Two Figures Eating, 1890
Vincent van Gogh, Interior with Five Figures Around a Table, 1890
Vincent van Gogh, Three Figures Eating, 1890
