This 30th of March marked Van Gogh’s 167th birthday. As you may know,
it was also the day The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen was stolen.
A thief (or thieves) broke into the Singer Laren museum at 3:15 am and, taking advantage of slower
response times from the police due to the Coronavirus pandemic, they left swiftly.
Van Gogh painted this artwork in May 1884. He moved to Nuenen a couple of months earlier, in
December 1883 and lived there two years with his parents, his father being the small town’s pastor.
Van Gogh painted this garden many times throughout his stay, documenting the seasons like Monet would
with his Haystacks series just 4 years later. This depicts the garden in Spring. You see, of course,
the garden, framed by trees and vegetation. A woman dressed in black breaks the bareness
of the scene as she turns around to look at us, standing on a path which leads our eye to an old
church. This church will also be the subject of a Van Gogh painting: Old Church Tower at Nuenen.
Just a couple of months after painting The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen, Vincent Van Gogh
painted his now famous Potato Eaters. It’s his first major artwork and, like the now
stolen painting, it’s very different from what we usually know him for. First, it isn’t as bright
and vibrant as his later paintings. It’s earthy, dark and gloomy. Second, it isn’t a landscape
or a self-portrait, but the depiction of a peasant family through a realist lens. Realism, pioneered
by Gustave Courbet only 3 decades before, consisted of depicting reality as genuinely
as possible and this quest for authenticity is echoed all throughout Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters.
But before talking about the painting’s background, let’s look at it a bit more
thoroughly. It’s a painting of peasants in the city of Nuenen in the Netherlands. This type of
painting wasn’t unheard of at the time, in fact, the Potato Eaters was inspired by Jozef Israels’
A Peasant Family at the Table, made in 1882. Both paintings are similar in their subject matter, in
the light coming from the centre of the painting and in the positioning of the family members
around the table. However, Van Gogh’s depiction is much more intimate. We’re closer to the family,
we can see their facial features, their hands and their clothes. We can also see small
details in the background such as the religious painting and the clock showing how late it is.
All of these details reinforce the message Van Gogh wanted to convey:
“You see, I really have wanted to make it so that people get the idea that these folk,
who are eating their potatoes by the light of their little lamp,
have tilled the earth themselves with these hands they are putting in the dish,
and so it speaks of manual labour and — that they have thus honestly earned their food.”
This is what Vincent wrote to his brother Theo about the Potato Eaters on the 30th of April 1885.
He wants to show us how these people work hard to survive. He shows how
this labour left its mark on their rugged faces; he shows their sharp bony hands,
the ones they use to both plow the earth and eat their potatoes.
And it’s really through these specific details, the peasants’ faces and hands, that Van Gogh
achieves the authenticity he was aiming for. In the same letter sent to Theo, he wrote:
“Although I’ll have painted the actual painting in a relatively short time,
and largely from memory, it’s taken a whole winter of painting studies of heads and hands.”
This really shows Van Gogh’s dedication to depicting peasant life.
“I’ve become so absorbed in peasant life by continually seeing it at all hours of
the day that I really hardly ever think of anything else.”
Van Gogh really wanted to depict peasant life genuinely. It would
almost be insulting to paint peasants smoothly as it would undermine all the daily work they
do to survive. This painting is dirty, it’s earthy, it’s cramped. It’s not a
comforting image and perhaps this is why it became popular only after Van Gogh’s death.
“[...] one would be wrong, to my mind, to give a peasant painting a certain conventional
smoothness. If a peasant painting smells of bacon, smoke, potato steam — fine — that’s not unhealthy
— if a stable smells of manure — very well, that’s what a stable’s for — if the field has an odour of
ripe wheat or potatoes or — of guano and manure — that’s really healthy — particularly for city
folk. they get something useful out of paintings like this. But a peasant painting mustn’t become
perfumed. I’m curious as to whether you’ll find anything in it that you like — I hope so.”