You Shall Eat the Plants of the Field

You Shall Eat the Plants of the Field Commentary by Ben Quash Cite Share Show Bible Passage Read by Ben Quash Vincent van Gogh was proud of this early painting, seeing it as the point at which he had broken through to an originality of expression for which he had long sought. The special qualities of it are oddly of a piece with its awkward and unidealized human bodies and faces and its surreally compacted rendition of a small domestic space. ‘While I was doing it’, wrote van Gogh to his art-dealer brother Theo, ‘I thought again about what has so rightly been said of [Jean-François] Millet’s peasants—“His peasants seem to have been painted with the soil they sow”’ (Van Gogh 1885). The five figures of the potato eaters are therefore coloured like the potatoes that are their sole source of sustenance, along with the coffee that is poured by the elderly woman on the right of the composition. In Van Gogh’s own words, he wanted them to be ‘something like the colour of a really dusty potato, unpeeled of course’ (Van Gogh 1885). The harsh life promised to Adam in Genesis 3 is the life that is a daily reality for these peasants. They must contend with an unforgiving environment. Their arthritically gnarled fingers suggest chronic pain. The low lighting evokes winter and its intense cold. And yet, there is an extraordinary aura around this dingy table, enhanced by the single, shared light whose glow contests the drab hegemony of the other colours. There is also an energy of physical warmth and mutual connection among the bodies. ‘I like so much better to paint the eyes of people than to paint cathedrals’, Van Gogh wrote shortly after making this work. It might be that in this work he allowed one to evoke the other. As some of the eyes around this table shine—perhaps with anticipation of rewards beyond the physical sustenance that this all-too basic meal will afford them (love returned; desire requited)—the room takes on analogies with a place of worship. The shared table is a sort of altar, in which the workers are united around the fruit of their labours, and momentarily, partially, transfigured. The young couple on the left must live as Adam and Eve had to live when they lost the bounty of paradise. But the Fall has not severed all that bound them to one another, and bound them both to their first joy. Together, they still yearn for better things. References Jones, Jonathan. 2003. ‘Portrait of the Week: The Potato Eaters, Vincent van Gogh (1885), 11 January 2003’, www.theguardian.com, [accessed 16 June 2022] Sensier, Alfred. 1881. La Vie et l’œuvre de J.F. Millet (Paris: A. Quantin) Van Gogh, Vincent. 1885. ‘Letter to Theo van Gogh, Nuenen, c.2 May 1885’, trans. by Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, ed. by Robert Harrison, #405, http://webexhibits.org/vangogh/letter/15/405.htm [accessed 29 June 2022]