Starry Night is arguably Vincent Van Gogh's most famous painting. It depicts a brilliant and swirling night sky with stars and a crescent moon shining their brilliant light on a small village. It is a beautiful vision of nature and very different in both style and emotional impact than Van Gogh's early work. The most famous of these early paintings is called The Potato Eaters.
The Potato Eaters was completed in 1885 and is not a pretty picture of peasant life. It shows a grimey looking peasant family eating potatoes, lit by a single gas lamp. They eats their potatoes with the same dirty hands used to harvest their meal. Even their skin is, by Van Gogh's intention, the color of a dusty potato. The painting reflects his ambivalence towards manual labor -- course and ugly but at the same time honest:
"You see, I really have wanted to make it so that people get the idea that these folk, who are eating their potatoes by the light of their little lamp, have tilled the earth themselves with these hands they are putting in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labour and — that they have thus honestly earned their food. I wanted it to give the idea of a wholly different way of life from ours — civilized people. So I certainly don’t want everyone just to admire it or approve of it without knowing why" -Vincent Van Gogh, 1885
Last weekend, My nine year old son and I planted four varieties of potatoes. As we dug into the ground, I thought of this Van Gogh painting. Sowing seed potatoes puts your hands deep into the earth and harveting potatoes is messier still since you need to sift through the soil to find the spuds. It's definitely the kind of work that gets dirt under the fingernails.
I would not want a life completely dependant on agricultural toil to survive. By the same token, a life divorced from the pleasures growing and eating your own crops would be very unsatisfying. In a few months, I will go into my garden and dig through the soil looking for buried treasure -- Maris Piper, German Butterball, Yellow Finn, and All Blue. If I do well, I'll harvest 10 pounds of potatoes for each pound of seed potatoes sown. That would yield about 160 pounds of delicious potatoes for our family to mash, bake and make into crispy fries. Plenty of food for us modern potato eaters.
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