Date: 28-07-2002
Owning Institution: Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”      
Subject: 19th Century        

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 colours, “as if with the earth they work”, so Van Gogh set out to depict his family of labourers in “more or less the colour of a muddy potato, unpeeled of course.” His aim, he said, was “to emphasise that those people, eating their potatoes in the lamplight, have dug the earth with those very hands they put in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labour, and how they have honestly earned their food."

Van Gogh’s disdain for the polish and refinement of more prettified (and more readily marketable) depictions of the rural poor is manifest not only in his palette but also in the crude and almost caricatural vigour with which he has characterised the five peasants sitting round their dinner table. Here his style seems indebted to contemporary cartoons and illustrations and also, perhaps, to the example of folk art. “It would be wrong”, he wrote, “to give a peasant picture a certain conventional smoothness. If a peasant picture smells of bacon, smoke, potato steam – all right, that’s not unhealthy… to be perfumed is not what a peasant picture needs.”

 The painter’s asceticism was coloured by an evangelistic sense of mission. Van Gogh’s father Theodorus (who died just weeks before the painting was begun) had been a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church. Vincent had attempted to follow in his footsteps, working as a missionary among the miners of the Borinage, the principal coal-mining region of Belgium. While there he had lived with the poor, almost as a latterday St Francis of Assisi, giving away his clothes, wearing only rags and living in a cold and ramshackle hut. But for all his evident dedication he was not deemed to be made of quite the right stuff for a would-be evangelist. According to the Report of the Union of Protestant Churches of Belgium for 1879-80, despite “the admirable qualities that he had shown in the care of the sick and the injured”, Van Gogh was fatally hampered by his lack of “a talent for speaking, indispensable for anyone placed at the head of a congregation”.

Van Gogh’s response to that rejection was to become an artist, which he regarded as another form of religious calling. He was always to think of The Potato Eaters with special affection (describing it more than once as the best thing he had done), perhaps because he thought of it as his first fully formed essay in religious painting. The picture perfectly incarnates his Christian devotion to the poor, seen for centuries as the “living images” of Christ because they partake more truly than anyone else of of his material poverty – and one which also, despite its apparently secular subject, subtly alludes to the traditional religious painting of the past. The theme of a humble meal eaten in a simple but dark room inevitably evokes the subject of The Supper at Emmaus, when Christ after His Resurrection appeared to some of His initially incredulous disciples.

But overall, the mood of the painting is ambiguous. For all its intentionally crude fervency, it hints too at the doubts and anxieties that were to plague Van Gogh, both as a painter and as a Christian, during his short but meteoric career. The oil lamp suspended above the table was probably intended by the artist to symbolise the light of salvation, which falls even on lives as blighted as these. But the light is faint, and seems to gutter, leaving the painting suspended – like Van Gogh himself – between intense spiritual hope and an altogether darker mood.