Study for 'The Potato Eaters'

The finished Potato Eaters hangs in this same museum. This is the first oil sketch for it, roughly 33 by 44 centimetres, painted in Nuenen in April 1885. Van Gogh built up to the big canvas in stages. Through the winter of 1884 and into that spring he painted more than 40 heads of local peasants inside their own cottages, then small studies of details such as a hand holding a coffee bowl, then a pencil drawing of the whole scene, then this rough sketch in oil, and after it a full-size study that is now in Otterlo. Four figures sit around the table here. The finished picture has five, the extra one a girl seen from behind.