Artist: Vincent Van Gogh
Style: Post-Impressionism
Topic: Body Women Peasants Woman
Date: 1885
Size: 41 x 34 cm
Museum: Kröller-Müller Museum (Otterlo, Netherlands)
Technique: Oil
Van Gogh believed that rural laborers stood closer to nature than other people, and were more strongly linked to the cycles of life. Between 1883 and 1885, while living with his parents in Brabant, he made a series of paintings and drawings describing the humble life of the peasants there. One of these was The Potato Eaters, which depicts a family gathered around their evening meal. His first significant interior night scene, it is also widely accepted as his first major canvas. To make it he returned regularly to the home of a local family and sketched them at dinner. He made one large study, from which he printed a lithograph, and a series of studies of figures and heads before starting the final composition. The Potato Eaters was immediately followed by The Cottage, a painting of one of the region’s modest rural homes, again depicted in the evening. Van Gogh’s affection for such dwellings, which he called “human nests,” would be evident in his work until the end of his life. In 1890, during a spell of homesickness in Saint-Rémy, in the South of France, he considered producing another version of The Cottage, but it never materialized.
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