This progression of a day ends in van Gogh’s 1885 large-scale painting, The Potato Eaters, where the peasants finally sit down to share a meal, as any other family would, leaving their meager work behind until the next day. This piece represented a culmination of the peasants’ day, as well as their rough lives that he had depicted in his numerous studies. 
Here, van Gogh sits the peasants around a table, and for the first time, we see the peasants sitting almost completely upright. It is almost as if this is the peasants’ first break; previous to this, all of van Gogh’s peasants were noticeably hunched over, and although here they still are, it is to a much lesser degree. Van Gogh knew that they legitimately worked very hard for their food, and this was his way of sharing this fact with his viewers. He said in a letter to Theo:
The point is that I’ve tried to bring out the idea that these people eating potatoes by the light of their lamp have dug the earth with the self-same hands they are now putting into the dish, and it thus suggests manual labor and - a meal honestly earned. I wanted to convey a picture of a way of life quite different from ours, from that of civilized people. So the last thing I would want is for people to admire or approve of it without knowing why (qtd Leeuw 291, letter 404, 30 April 1885).
Eating their meager meals at dinner was the one time that the peasants could be released from their daily work, where they could stop bending over from the back-breaking work they did from sunrise to sunset. In the letter, he clearly states that what people said about the painting was insignificant to him. He wanted the viewers to understand before they could appreciate it.
Despite the fact that van Gogh thought it was an accurate representation of the peasants, the painting, like his drawings, was highly criticized. Criticism even caused van Gogh’s relationship with his friend, Anthon van Rappard to end, as van Rappard commented to van Gogh:
You will agree that such work is not serious. Fortunately, you can do better than this. But then why have you observed and treated everything so superficially? Why haven’t you studied their movement? They look so posed. That genteel hand of the woman and the back is completely unrealistic! (Van Tilborgh 14).Van Rappard saw what everyone else did: van Gogh’s figures were not pretty; there was something off about them. They had strange, gawky features and looked awkward - not the type of people a potential buyer would want hung on his wall. Van Rappard comments on how “superficial” the characters are and on how one of the women’s hands looks entirely wrong. Looking at the painting from purely academic and anatomical standpoints, van Rappard was correct in his observations. But he did not have the same experience with the subjects of van Gogh’s painting; he did not see how much hardship they were in, and therefore could never see The Potato Eaters in the same light that van Gogh did as he painted it. The hardworking and plain peasants were simply ugly and lacked the aesthetic qualities normally seen on figures that artists chose to render in their paintings. All of the bodies look very uncomfortable, and again, something with their anatomy is incorrect. However, if they looked like they were comfortable and correctly proportioned, the same effect of hardship and survival would not be as prominent and consequently not as integral to the theme and message of the painting.