According to Nicholas Hutchinson, man of the cloth and author of Praying Each Day of the Year – a compilation of curious anniversaries, ingeniously moralised – 28 July “is reputed to be the day when Sir Walter Raleigh was the first to plant potatoes in Europe”. It would be interesting to know how Brother Hutchinson came by such precise information vis-a-vis Elizabethan potato-planting practices. But putting all such ungenerous scepticism aside, this week’s aptly tuberiferous choice of picture is The Potato Eaters, by Vincent Van Gogh, painted in the Dutch town of Nuenen in the spring of 1885.
Van Gogh’s first large-scale figure painting, it is an ambitious if somewhat muddy portrayal of a Dutch peasant family eating a humble meal at home in their simple low-ceilinged cottage. The murky grey-green tonalities of the picture, so far removed from the strident primary colours that characterise the artist’s later and more popular work, can partly be explained by the questionable quality of the materials he was able to obtain at the time. His friend Anton Kerssemakers recalled introducing the hard-up Van Gogh to a house-painter in Nuenen, who in return for the odd picture “prepared for him the colours he needed most, such as white and ochre and several others. Since, however, this house painter was no expert, these colours often left much to be desired, but pressed by lack of money, Van Gogh had to make the best of it.”
However, Van Gogh’s correspondence with his younger brother Theo suggests that he was by no means displeased with the dark and sombre effect of the picture. He wrote of his determination to emulate the example of the older French artist Jean-Francois Millet by becoming a true “peasant painter”. Just as Millet had painted the rural poor in low-toned...
