1885: the end of the Brabant years

The record dates The Potato Eaters to 1885, the last full year of the Nuenen period and by some distance the busiest of the Dutch years in this catalogue — seventy painted works carry that date, against twenty-five for 1884.

What the record gives

The canvas is 82 x 114 cm and is held by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Those dimensions are the fact worth noticing: of the works dated 1881 to 1885 whose measurements the record carries, this is the largest. The rest are studies, almost all under a metre in either direction; this is a composed multi-figure picture on a scale the record shows no precedent for. The measured palette returns yellow and green as the dominant families, over a body of work from that year that comes back brown more than half the time.

The heads that precede it

The catalogue holds seven painted heads dated 1885 with titles beginning Head of a Peasant, one of them recorded outright as Head of a Peasant (Study for the Potato Eaters). Read chronologically, those heads and this canvas belong to one campaign: a run of separate faces, then a single interior that puts them around a table. It is the clearest instance in the Dutch years of the record showing preparation and result side by side.