An exhibition in the Netherlands explores Vincent van Gogh’s artistic affinity for the humble potato.
Before moving to Paris and becoming enamored with flowers — a more vibrant subject for which there was, coincidentally, a larger market — van Gogh made spuds a focal point of his early peasant studies, five of which are on display at the Noordbrabants Museum in ’s-Hertogenbosch.
A lithograph of The Potato Eaters depicts peasants whose faces are themselves “something like the colour of a really dusty potato,” van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo: “Unpeeled of course.” A form of “peasant gold,” potatoes were for van Gogh a symbol of “how closely people lived with nature in the countryside,” the exhibition’s curator told The Art Newspaper.