The Meal

In 1900 the Rijksmuseum received a gift of modern French paintings from Baroness van Lynden-van Pallandt in The Hague, who had bought them in Paris at sales and through the dealers Goupil and Company, the firm that later, as Boussod and Valadon, employed Theo van Gogh, Vincent's brother. This canvas came with that gift. It shows a peasant woman and a child eating from one large bowl, and it belongs to the world Boulard painted around L'Isle-Adam, the village on the Oise north of Paris where he worked among landscape painters. The Rijksmuseum has lent it to the Van Gogh Museum since 1991, which is how a French peasant meal came to hang in the museum that also owns The Potato Eaters, Van Gogh's own dark picture of a family at supper.