The Potato Eaters

By the spring of 1885 Van Gogh was living in Nuenen, a village in the Catholic south of the Netherlands, painting the weavers and farm families around him. In April he set out to make one ambitious canvas: a peasant family at supper under a single hanging lamp. What you are looking at is his first go at that idea, worked up in roughly three days. He then reworked the whole thing, and the version most people know, now in Amsterdam, added a fifth person at the table and turned their drink into a brew of roasted chicory. Here there are four figures, their faces close to the colour of the potatoes they share, the same hands that dug the field reaching for the dish. He wanted the lamplight to look earned and the food to look poor, and he built the room out of browns so dark they almost close over the figures.