Baskets of Potatoes

Hardly anyone chooses potatoes for a still life this size. Van Gogh painted it in Nuenen in the early autumn of 1885, and he told Theo exactly what he was after on 4 October. He had tried to get body into it, to express the material, so that the potatoes become lumps that have weight and are solid, which you would feel if they were thrown at you. The colour stays inside one narrow family of browns and dull greens, with the modelling carrying everything. In the same letter he admitted such things were difficult to sell, called the work devilish useful, and promised to do a lot more of it over the winter. Other still lifes came out of those same weeks in Nuenen, a copper kettle and some fruit among them.