The Potato Eaters, 1885
Vincent van Gogh
Oil on canvas · 82 x 114 cm
A dim farmhouse supper painted in Van Gogh's early, earth-toned palette.
By dim lamplight a peasant family shares a plate of potatoes, faces rough and hands worn by labour. Van Gogh considered this dark 1885 canvas his first true masterpiece — an unflinching, deeply human portrait of the rural poor he lived among.
What you're looking at
He wanted the colour of a dusty unpeeled potato and he got it — the whole canvas is browns and greens so muddied that his brother thought it unsellable, and he was right. The hands are the point: van Gogh made dozens of studies of peasant heads and hands first, and he wanted it obvious that the hands digging the potatoes are the hands eating them. The lamp is the only light and it flattens everyone under it.
On a Frame TV
About 1.31:1, so the matted file — the clean crop would take the lamp above or the table below. It is the darkest van Gogh here by a distance and needs an unlit room to read at all.
Van Gogh Museum · Visit it in Amsterdam →
- 4K master file (3840px+)
- Samsung Frame TV–ready crop
- Phone wallpaper crop
- Printable art card
Public domain · one .zip, no sign-up
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