• A. Johannes Vermeer
  • B. Vincent van Gogh
  • C. Rembrandt van Rijn
  • D. Piet Mondriaan

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Think of an artist who only became truly famous after his death. He spent some time in Nuenen, a small village in Brabant, and mainly painted ordinary people in their daily lives. His work is full of emotion and expression.

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The correct answer is B. Vincent van Gogh.

Van Gogh painted “The Potato Eaters” in the spring of 1885, when he was living in Nuenen. For him, this was truly his breakthrough - his first masterpiece. It shows five peasants sitting together at a table for their modest evening meal: potatoes.

What did Van Gogh want? To show the harsh reality. He deliberately chose dark, earthy colors - nothing glamorous. Those brown and gray tones emphasize the roughness of peasant life. In a letter to his brother Theo, he wrote something beautiful: these people eat with the same hands they used to dig their food from the ground. He found that honest, authentic.

You can now admire the painting at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. It truly marks a turning point in Van Gogh’s growth as an artist.

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Funny enough, “The Potato Eaters” was anything but a success during Van Gogh’s lifetime. Fellow artists even criticized the work. Now? A masterpiece that made his later, more colorful paintings possible.

Van Gogh was quite perfectionistic about this. He made more than fifty studies and sketches before he was satisfied. At the time, he was still living at home with his parents in Nuenen - his father was a minister there. The people in the painting weren’t models, but real peasants from the area: the De Groot-van Rooij family.

Did you know that Van Gogh later became critical of this dark work himself? Once he was living in Paris and working with much lighter colors, he saw it differently. But still, “The Potato Eaters” remains an icon of social realism in our Dutch art history.

The canvas measures 82 by 114 centimeters. Van Gogh saw this painting as proof that he could handle complex compositions with multiple figures - crucial for his credibility as a serious artist. He wanted to show that he really had the skills.