The Potato Eaters is a painting by Vincent van Gogh, finished in 1885 in the Dutch village of Nuenen and now in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. It shows a peasant family eating boiled potatoes under one lamp. Van Gogh painted it dark and rough on purpose, to say that people who work the land have earned what they eat.
He did not want the picture to be liked. He wanted it to be true. He had spent the winter drawing the faces of local farmers, and by spring he considered this canvas the best work he had done so far.
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Dark on purpose is Van Gogh's version. Anthon van Rappard, a painter and one of his closest friends, saw nothing deliberate in it.
Rappard wrote that the figures were wrong and asked why the man on the right could not have "a knee or a belly or lungs." Then he added the sentence that cut deepest: "Art is too important, it seems to me, to be treated so cavalierly."
Van Gogh sent the letter back with a defense of his own. I think Rappard was right about the drawing and wrong about the point.
Who really sat at that table?
The De Groot family, farmers from Nuenen. Van Gogh did not sketch them once and move on. Over one winter he made more than forty studies of peasant faces, and as the canvas took shape he went back to the De Groot cottage countless evenings to draw what he saw there, among other things a clock and a spoon rack.
One of the five was Gordina de Groot, known as Sien, a farmer's daughter who sat for him often. The Noordbrabants Museum records that she was pregnant while unmarried and that Van Gogh was unfairly seen as the future father.
He painted the canvas in a few weeks of that spring, and wrote to his brother Theo in Paris to say how it was going. In a letter at the end of April, he gave him the sentence that explains the whole picture.
What You'll Discover
What Van Gogh said it should smell like.
What the lamp leaves in the dark.
How close it came to vanishing.
How the quarrel with Rappard ended.