Baskets of Potatoes

Baskets of Potatoes (1885) at the Van Gogh Museum multiplies and accumulates the potato subject that had been central to his moral and artistic programme since his arrival in Nuenen. By the time he painted this, he had completed The Potato Eaters — the major statement about peasant life he had been building toward — and continued to engage the potato as both an ordinary domestic object and a loaded symbol. Multiple baskets, arranged in spatial relationships rather than the close-up isolation of a single subject, gave him a more complex compositional problem: how different objects at different scales and angles related to each other within a pictorial space, how shadows fell between them, how their forms completed and echoed each other. This compositional complexity was part of his preparation for the ambitious multi-figure compositions he was developing. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Multiple baskets require Van Gogh to establish spatial relationships between objects at different distances and angles, giving the still life a more complex spatial structure than a single object study. The dark, earthy palette of his Nuenen period unifies the various elements while the varying basket orientations create gentle compositional variety. The paint surface is built up with vigorous, directional strokes consistent with his Dutch period approach.