About this artwork
Van Gogh painted The Potato Peeler in 1885 in Nuenen, a village in the southern Netherlands where his father was the parish pastor. He was 32 years old and had been painting for five years, living with his parents and working in a small studio he had built in the back of the house. This is the period before he discovered color, before Paris, before Arles.
The painting shows a peasant woman seated at a table, peeling potatoes. She wears a white cap and a dark dress, her body bent forward over her work. The light comes from a small window at the left, falling across her hands and the potatoes in her lap. The background is a plain wall, painted in dark browns. The composition is simple and frontal, with the figure filling most of the canvas.
Van Gogh painted the peasants of Nuenen throughout 1884 and 1885, producing over 100 works on the subject. He saw them as a serious subject, worthy of the same attention that Millet had given to French peasants in the 1850s. He wrote to his brother Theo that he wanted to paint peasants with a seriousness that the art world reserved for historical subjects, and that he wanted to convey the smell of the earth and the roughness of their hands.
The Potato Peeler is a study for The Potato Eaters, the large canvas that Van Gogh completed in April 1885 and considered his first major work. The Potato Eaters shows a family eating a meal of potatoes and coffee by lamplight, and it is the culmination of the Nuenen period. The Met's painting is one of several individual figure studies that Van Gogh made in preparation for the larger composition, working out the poses, the lighting, and the color of each figure separately.
The painting has a unusual history. The reverse of the canvas contains a second painting: Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat, which Van Gogh painted in Paris in 1887. He reused the canvas, painting over the potato peeler with his own image. The Met has had both sides of the canvas since 1967, and the self-portrait is displayed separately.
Oil on canvas, 40 by 31 centimeters. The palette is dark and earthy: browns, grays, and ochres, with a single note of white in the cap. The brushwork is rough and physical, with the paint applied in thick, directional strokes that follow the forms of the figure. The surface has the dense, worked quality of someone painting in a cold room with poor light.
The vertical format and dark palette make this print work well in a study, kitchen, or dining room. The earth tones pair with wood, stone, and natural materials. The 11x14 or 16x20 framed version is a good size for most walls. The painting has a sober, grounded quality that suits rooms with traditional furniture and warm, low lighting.
The painting entered the Met's collection in 1967, bequeathed by Adelaide Milton de Groot. It is one of the few works from Van Gogh's Dutch period in an American collection.
This is a public domain artwork (CC0), scanned from the original at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.
