The Potato Eaters

The Potato Eaters is an oil painting by Vincent van Gogh, which he made at Nuenen in the Netherlands and which is considered his first major work. It shows a peasant family sharing a meal of potatoes and coffee by the dim light of a single oil lamp in a cramped, dark room. Van Gogh wanted to depict the lives of poor rural people honestly, and he used rough, earthy colours and deliberately coarse features so that the figures looked like people who worked the land with their hands. The painting was criticized by his friend Anton van Rappard, but Van Gogh defended it strongly. It is very different from the bright colours of his later work in France, and it is held at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

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