An Ugly Scene?
Vibrancy is everywhere in van Gogh’s work, but it is not always accompanied by a beautiful scene. The Potato Eaters, painted in 1885 and now perhaps the most famous of his earlier works, presents a perfect example. Unlike Starry Night , an exuberant shout to the beauty of nature and the sky, The Potato Eaters embraces the ugliness of the lowest worker. It highlights every inch of dirt on the faces of its characters, creating, as Vincent’s friend and fellow painter Emile Bernard called it, “a fearful canvas of remarkable ugliness and yet with a disturbing life” (qtd. Callow 201). The vivacity of this “disturbing life” is the central theme at work, and we can look to Vincent’s letters for proof:
I have tried to make it clear how those people, eating their potatoes under the lamplight, have dug the earth with those very hands they put in their dish, and so it speaks of manual labor, and how they have honestly earned their food. I have wanted to give the impression of quite a different way of living than that of us civilized people. Therefore I am not at all anxious for everyone to like it or to admire it at once. (Letter 404, van Gogh)
As van Gogh tells us, the picture is meant to be flawed and unpleasant. After all, how else should he have portrayed such a scene?
The unpleasantness van Gogh chose to depict was all around him. While in his letter he was careful to separate “us civilized people” from these workers, he clearly identified with them to some degree. At the time of this painting, he was purposely living in squalor, sleeping in a bed in the cold attic, rather than the larger, warmer room downstairs. Even when invited to someone’s house for dinner, he ate only bread and cheese. “Anything more,” Philip Callow writes, “he regarded as ‘coddling’” (Callow 171). It was a simple life, yet like the workers in his painting, he was always vibrant, churning out paintings at a furious rate for the near decade he worked. Imperfect and ugly, like the workers, he saw flaws all around him, and he brought them to light in his paintings. The Potato Eaters is not a pretty picture at all, but for van Gogh, neither was life.