Agostina Segatori Sitting in the Café du Tambourin
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
The Potato Eaters, Vincent van Gogh, 1885. Oil on canvas, 82 × 114 cm. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Public domain.
The image on this page is a studio placeholder, not the painting. The open-access file from Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam replaces it when the gallery's image pipeline runs — we would rather show you a card that says so than a reproduction we have not verified.
Post-Impressionism
The Potato Eaters
Vincent van Gogh · 1885
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 82 × 114 cm
- Held by
- Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
- Licence
- Public domain
- Movement
- Post-Impressionism
- Country
- Netherlands
The painter
Vincent van Gogh
Van Gogh painted for roughly ten years, and for the first five of them he was not very good. That is worth saying plainly, because the usual telling turns him into a natural whose genius was simply unrecognised. He trained himself late, starting at twenty-seven after failing as an art dealer, a teacher and a lay preacher, and the early Dutch work is dark, thick and often badly drawn — he knew it, and he kept drawing figures for years specifically because he knew it.
Nearby
Related works
The Bedroom
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Café Terrace at Night
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo
Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
The Starry Night
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Sunflowers
The National Gallery, London
What to look at
Van Gogh wanted this to be judged as his first real picture, and he wanted it judged on the hands. He wrote to his brother that he had tried to show that these people, eating potatoes by lamplight, had dug the earth with the same hands they are now putting into the dish — and that this was the whole honesty of the thing. Look at how much of the canvas the hands occupy relative to the faces. The palette is deliberately dirty: he described it as the colour of a very dusty potato, unpeeled, and he built it from earth pigments with almost no pure colour anywhere. The single oil lamp is the only light source and he lets it fail quickly, so the back of the room dissolves. The drawing is awkward in places — the woman at the right has an arm that does not quite resolve — and contemporaries said so. He knew. He kept it anyway, because the awkwardness was closer to what he was after than correctness would have been.