Peasants Planting Potatoes

In 1884 Van Gogh was 31 and living with his parents in Nuenen, a village in the Dutch province of Brabant. A neighbour, a retired goldsmith named Antoon Hermans, wanted to decorate his dining room and had in mind saints and the Last Supper. Van Gogh argued him out of it and into scenes of the local countryside instead, the peasants' year told through the seasons. This long panel is spring, the planting of the potatoes that were the region's staple food. Its shape was made to run along a wall above the dining table. Hermans wanted a crowd, so Van Gogh worked seven figures in, more than he had first planned, and he admitted in his letters that he never quite managed to bind them into one scene. A year later, still in Nuenen, he would gather figures like these around a single lamp for The Potato Eaters.