The Potato Eaters

Around a rough table in a dim cottage, a peasant family gathers to share a plate of potatoes by the light of a single hanging lamp, their faces coarse and their knotted hands reaching for the food they have dug from the earth. Van Gogh painted the Potato Eaters in dark, earthy browns in his native Holland, deliberately ungainly, wanting to show that these laborers had honestly earned their meal. Now in the Van Gogh Museum, it is his first major work - raw, sympathetic, and unsentimental, an act of solidarity with the rural poor.