Five peasants share a meal of potatoes under a single oil lamp in a cottage at Nuenen. Van Gogh wanted to show people who had "tilled the earth themselves with these hands they are putting in the dish", and painted them coarse on purpose. The dark, earthy palette comes from the Hague School, and two years later he still called it his best work.
Look closer
A girl sits with her back to us at the centre of the table, a device Van Gogh may have taken from Jozef Israëls's A Peasant Family at the Table.
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Compared by a vision model
