Van Gogh’s Peasants

Crouching Peasant, Hidden Message

Cynthia Michalak, Princeton Class of 2009

Is Vincent van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters really a masterpiece? How could a work that is so anatomically inaccurate and awkwardly posed be considered such a great piece? It is true. When taking a good look at some of van Gogh’s earliest drawings and paintings, something seems a little off about his figures. A viewer could very well assume that since van Gogh was a new artist, he just had a lot to learn, and had not yet reached a level of comfort in his illustration of figures. This is asserted by Sjraar van Heugten in the exhibition catalogue, Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings. According to van Heugten:

Van Gogh had a long way to go to become an accomplished artist, and the difficulties he encountered in representing his subjects are often reflected in the drawings. The figures done in Etten are bony and their gestures wooden. They are frequently depicted in profile, which allowed van Gogh to avoid the complex problems of foreshortening (Ives 56).

As van Heugten points out, van Gogh seemed to have some trouble in making his peasants appear natural in their pose. They are bent over, and appear so stiff that they look as if they are stuck in that one paining pose, never to move again. There is something about his people that they truly do look “bony” and “wooden” as van Heugten suggests. It is as if he forgot that humans have muscles and flesh that also need to be shown for a body to look natural and alive. But saying that he “had a long way to go” is a rather ignorant conclusion to make of this awkwardness. Van Heugten, when making this argument, obviously did not make the connection between the awkward positioning of the peasants and van Gogh’s background and history with them. Had he done this, he would have seen that van Gogh was trying to convey a message to his audience through his hunched over peasants and their gradual rise over time.

Van Heugten implies that van Gogh needed more artistic training to create natural-looking figures. However, such was not the case. Van Gogh did not pose his peasants awkwardly, hunching their backs over their work because of a lack of artistic training. Rather, van Gogh knew exactly what he was doing. Van Gogh had previously worked as an evangelist, where he lived among these peasants he painted and thus learned about their lives from a new perspective. He took this knowledge with him to the canvas, and from that tried to express that their weighed down appearance was completely due to their harsh lives. This is what critics like van Heugten, who comment on van Gogh’s lack of skill at his early stages miss; they fail to take into account the five years that van Gogh spent studying these people, essentially putting every detail of their lives on to paper and canvas. In understanding that van Gogh had the first-person knowledge of how hard the lives of the peasants were and put in the time to study them enough, we cannot be fully confident, as Ives seems to be, that the strange anatomy of his peasants was a showing of his lack of artistic skill. Instead, it appears that van Gogh chose to depict these people in the truest way possible by showing how their work literally and figuratively weighed down their lives.

The Exhibit
Background
Earliest Works
Moving Up
The Potato Eaters
Conclusion
Works Cited
About the Author

The Gallery
Van Gogh as an Evangelist
Van Gogh and Millet
Peasants in Later Years
The Roulin Family