Basket of Potatoes

By September 1885 Van Gogh was running short of people to paint. The Catholic priest in Nuenen had told his parishioners to stop sitting for the Protestant vicar's son, after village gossip that Vincent had fathered a local girl's child, which he denied. So he painted what the household had to hand. This is one of three potato still lifes he made that month, and he treated them as colour exercises, one worked up in sienna, one in burnt sienna, one in yellow and red ochre, all of them variations on the same brown grey. What he was after was weight. He wrote to his brother Theo in October that he wanted the potatoes to come out as lumps you would feel if somebody threw them at you.