The Potato Peeler

The Potato Peeler (1885), at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, depicts one of the rural women Van Gogh observed in and around Nuenen during his studies of peasant life. The act of peeling potatoes—utterly commonplace, endlessly repeated, domestic and essential—was precisely the kind of subject that Van Gogh believed deserved artistic treatment with the seriousness usually reserved for mythological or historical subjects. He had written to Theo about his desire to paint peasants as Millet had painted them: not picturesque but real, not sentimentalised but honest. The Metropolitan's holding of this work places it in one of the world's great encyclopedic museums as a document of Van Gogh's early moral vision.

The figure is painted in the sombre, earthy tones of Van Gogh's Nuenen period—deep greens, browns, and ochres that reflect the actual environment of peasant interiors and the moral weight he attached to the subject. The hands, engaged in the act of peeling, are likely painted with particular attention as the instrument of the depicted labour. The face receives careful characterisation despite the dim light of the interior.