For Vincent van Gogh,
The Potato Eaters
(1885) was his masterpiece with a realistic message, and he prepared it with dedication, but his brother Theo believed that it was full of errors and no one would take it seriously on the art market in Paris. , so he let it
gather dust
on his mantelpiece.
The Potato Eaters today is worth US$100 million (Van Gogh Museum).
It is a portrait of a group of people, which Van Gogh
began to draw in March 1885
in Nuenen, a peasant village in Brabant, in the south of the Netherlands.
Van Gogh had lived there with his parents and used that same setting for the painting with which he sought to sell himself to the world as a figure painter, but, given his little experience portraying standing people, he chose a family sitting at the table, or whatever. he himself called that thing with
the peasants around a plate of potatoes at night.
He spent months practicing drawing
He spent months practicing how to draw heads, and made dozens of preliminary sketches that show the advances in his painting technique, until reaching the final version: a painting with dark tones and
five people
: two eating from a plate of hot potatoes, two serving and drinking coffee, and a girl with her back to her sitting at the table.
Behind, a clock reveals the Dutch dinner time:
it has just struck 7:00
p.m.
Above their heads hangs an oil lamp that takes over from the sun and illuminates the room where they are, a space that housed the entire house: dining room, kitchen and bedroom.
Van Gogh's idea was to show the poverty and harsh reality of peasant life, which he highlighted with rough faces and bony hands that have tilled the land to obtain the food they are now putting on the plate.
They have honestly earned their food, the artist wrote.
The sketches of the painting that Van Gogh painted (Van Gogh Museum).
He was not seeking technical perfection with his painting, but rather the message he wanted to convey about peasant life, about the raw honesty of hard life in the countryside.
For him, the painting was a success,
and although he did not use the term masterpiece, he considered it similar to Sunflowers, his Room or La Berceuse.
His great friend and artist Anthon van Rappard (1858-1892) was not at all enthusiastic about the work.
Come now!
“I think art is too relevant to treat it with such arrogance,” Van Rappard told him, in a critique that marked the end of their friendship.
Nobody believed that his painting was good
But Van Gogh, who wanted to portray harsh reality, continued to believe in his piece and the message conveyed was more important than the mistakes he could have made in the painting.
His brother placed it over the fireplace
, nor did he bother to offer it for sale, even though Van Gogh wanted it as a business card.
He was an idealist painter, a man of the people, who did not enjoy the city, and was convinced of the message he wanted to convey, but this famous painting (the curator believes) would not have impressed in Paris at that time either due to its darkness in the middle. of the new modern art of the time, which Van Gogh was unaware of at the time.
In 1887, he wrote to his sister Guillermina:
"This is my best work."
That is very interesting because by then he had already gone to Paris, he had changed his work methods and his style, more towards bright colors, but he still had Nuenen's dark painting in mind, says the conservator.
The house that Van Gogh used to paint the painting (Van Gogh Museum).
In 1890, about five years later, he began drawing drawings of potato eaters again.
He was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, southern France, and nostalgia for the north made him want to visit his most important work of his early years.
The Amsterdam museum houses a full-scale reconstruction of the interior of the peasant's house, as drawn by Van Gogh, and visitors can sit at the family's table, pose, have their photos taken, or stand in the corner where the artist passed hours preparing your favorite painting.
Some appraisers believe that
this painting is worth $500 million today.
EFE Agency.
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