Hand-painted in oil
About this Artwork
One of four entries on the same subject
The record dates The Potato Eaters (preliminary oil sketch) to 1885. Four titles in this catalogue name the potato eaters, and all four carry that date: this sketch, the finished canvas held by the Van Gogh Museum, a study called Four Peasants at a Meal and a study of a single peasant head. A catalogue that kept only the finished picture would show one work where the record holds four.
What the record gives
The work is held by the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo. No dimensions are recorded for it, so no size is quoted here. The measured palette reads as brown and yellow.
1885 in the arrangement
Seventy works in this catalogue are dated 1885, the closing and by far the largest year of the Nuenen period. Twenty-four of them name a peasant and twelve begin with the words head of. Brown dominates thirty-one. The year is the densest single point in the first half of the chronology, and the reason the period is named after a village rather than after a decade. What separates this entry from the other three is the record's own parenthesis — preliminary oil sketch — and this page does not read anything into the picture beyond what that phrase and the fields around it say.
