THE PATATO EATERS
By VINCENT VAN GOGH.
CONCEIVED as a summation of van Gogh's work and study up to that time, it also express most highly and fully his social and ethical feelings.He was a painter of peasants,not for the sake of their pictures queness although he was moved by their whole aspect but from a deep relation and solidarity with poor people, whose lives, like his own, were burdened with care.
He found in their common meal the occasion in which their humanity and moral beauty are strikingly revealed.they appear then as a close community. based upon work and the sharing of the fruits of work. The table is their altar & the food a sacrament for each one who has laboured . Under the light at this common table. The solitude of the individual is overcome and the harshness of nature, too-yet each figure retains a thought of its own and two of them seem to be on the brink of an unspoken loneliness. The colours of the dark in terior, brown, green, & blue, bring us back to nature outside.
In the homely faces and hands of these peasants in color and modelling they are like the potatoes that nourish them there is a touching purity. It is the purity of familial souls in whom care for one another and the hard struggle with the earth and weather leave little place for self striving .
The composition has a rough strength,in part the result of a naïve placing. And in van Gogh's clumsiness, which conveys also, as he intended, the clumsiness of his people, there is a source of movement. The groupings of the figures at the sides of the table is odd. The wall between the two figures at the right creates a strange partitioning of the intimate space.
Within the gloom of the dark tones are remarkable bits of painting, prepared by his tenacious studies, the cups of coffee, with their grey shadows, the potatoes on the platter, and the superb heads, which in their isolation from one another betray the portrait studies from which they were copy. The eyes of the two figures at the left shine with an inner light & the shadows on their features are more a modelling of character than a phenomenon of darkness.
"I like so much better to paint the eyes of people than to paint cathedrals"
Van Gogh wrote shortly after.
VINCENT VAN GOGH PAINTINGS..