Van Gogh's Potato Eaters: exhibition opens this Friday in Amsterdam

Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) is universally known for his images of sunflowers and rural landscapes, with vivid bursts of color that make them one of the most popular works in the world. XIX century. Less well known are their images of humble populations and associated objects (eg, a dirty old pair of boots). The most important painting in this line, and the one the painter considered his masterpiece, is “The Potato Eaters”. Painted in 1885, it depicts a peasant family eating, in an image with more or less obvious echoes of the Last Supper.

Van Gogh hoped the painting would help build his reputation in Paris, then the center of artistic life, but the opposite happened, and even regular supporters of the painter criticized him. Now the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, dedicates an entire exhibition to the painting, exploring its management and the context in which it emerged.

Entitled “The Potato Eaters: Mistake or Masterpiece?”, the exhibition opens this Friday and is open until February. works associated with the genesis of the painting, from paintings and drawings to engravings and simple sketches.Only studies of the faces of peasants will have been forty, of which the exhibition includes ten, according to TheArtNewspaper. It is clear that the work was laboriously conceived for some time , but the fact that Van Gogh does not give a romantic image of the peasants, contrary to what painters of the time like Millet used to do, may have harmed their popularity.

A curiosity of the exhibition is to have a full-size reproduction, in which the public can enter, of the shack where Van Gogh worked during the conception of “The Potato Eaters”. There are paintings by other painters there, and excerpts from letters exchanged with Van Gogh about the painting.

Particularly harsh are the criticisms of a friend of the painter of the allegedly crude way in which the figures of the peasants were drawn. If he conceived them deliberately rudely, it was to be more truthful. Personal, artistic truth does not always correspond to literal outward truth, let alone what that truth is sometimes required to be. “The Potato Eaters: Mistake or Masterpiece?” it’s an occasion to re-evaluate all these issues.

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