Potato Eaters, peasants, painting: following Vincent’s footsteps

We drove along a flat country road lined on both sides by pollarded trees (pruned to have a ball-like head of branches). Tracing Vincent Van Gogh’s footsteps through the southern Netherlands, I sensed that we’d stepped into his paintings. Clouds skudded across a huge sky and stooks of wheat stood before a windmill.

I was thrilled to be in Vincentland. But as we explored the small towns and countryside where he was born, raised, began his painting career, and honed his skills, I realized I’d really only known his later works – the irises, sunflowers and olive trees shimmering in the sunny heat of France. I had thought of his art as light-coloured, vibrant and alive; even his night scenes glistened with swirling stars.

But his early works, as he began painting in the southern Dutch province of Noordbrabant, were much darker, shadowy, rather gloomy scenes of peasant life – exemplified by The Potato Eaters.

I’m hardly alone in loving Vincent’s paintings – millions the world over do so. But how many fans are like me, not understanding how different his paintings were before he lived in Paris and southern France? How much had his roots in the Netherlands inspired him and continued to pull his heart home? And how had I come to love this tortured soul?

I pondered these questions as we explored Den Bosch, Zundert, Etten-Leur, Nuenen and a fabulous art museum set inside a national park.

Noordbrabants Museum

We stayed in the southern Dutch city of s’Hertogenbosch (Den Bosch for short) for 3.5 weeks while we pet-sat for a family. So naturally, we began our Vincent quest at the Noordbrabants Museum – the only museum in the province of Noordbrabant to hold original works by Vincent.

“The painter was profoundly attached to his native province; he was born here, and spent half of his life here,” said the museum’s website. “Brabant made him who he was.”

My heart quickened as we entered the rather darkened Van Gogh in Brabant gallery, which reflected the dark paintings. We saw “Watermill at Coll,” “Peasant Woman Digging,” “The Garden of the Vicarage at Nuenen,” “Head of a Woman” and more. Excerpts from letters, drawings, a shovel used for digging potatoes, and the starched white linen caps that women wore supported the dozen original paintings. There was even a movie poster for the 1956 film “Lust for Life,” starring Kirk Douglas as Vincent and based on Irving Stone’s 1934 book of the same name.

“Things are going well for me here in Brabant, anyway I find the countryside here very stimulating,” Vincent wrote.

The hard, simple, humble peasant life – primarily of farmers and weavers – fascinated and inspired Vincent, as did the changing seasons. He initially wanted to become a figure painter, and he practised by painting many head-and-shoulders of peasants, especially those with coarse features and full lips, those whose care-worn faces reflected their hard work. Later, in Nuenen, he applied what he’d learned in his famous “The Potato Eaters.”   

Zundert

A heart-warming sculpture of the two brothers – Vincent and Theo – was my favourite feature of Zundert, the small town not far from the Belgian border where the artist was born on March 30, 1853. Heads touching and arms entwined, the sculpture illustrates how close the brothers were. Theo was Vincent’s biggest supporter – emotionally, artistically, and financially – throughout Vincent’s troubled life. The stone base comes from Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in France and contains a box of soil from the asylum where Vincent stayed for a year. 

Vincent’s father, Theodorus, was a Dutch Reformed Church minister so the family lived in the parsonage near the church. We opened the squeaky black wrought-iron gate and wandered around the cemetery that surrounds the church. We found the small, flat gravestone of Vincent Van Gogh – Vincent’s stillborn brother of the same name who was born on March 30, 1852, exactly one year before the artist was born.

A few blocks from the church stands the Vincent van Goghhuis – a small museum where the parsonage stood until it was demolished in 1903. Vincent was born and lived there until age 16, when he moved to The Hague to work for an art dealer.

The excellent audioguide tour of the museum explained Vincent’s roots and how that affected his later work. The tour included audio of letters Vincent and Theo had exchanged. Not only did Theo support Vincent financially, but he also tried to convince their uncle and other art dealers to sell Vincent’s paintings.

We learned more about Vincent’s parents and other four siblings (brother Cornelis and sisters Anna, Elisabeth, and Wilhelmina), who loved him, but didn’t understand him. Their letters showed the frustration they felt with his inability to settle down to a job and a constant home.

He was a tortured soul and I feel sorry for him. I’m sure that, had he lived today, he would be diagnosed with some sort of mental illness or condition beyond simply depression. I know and love people like him, who battle what seem to be similar demons, so perhaps that’s why I feel drawn to him, even protective of him. I was relieved and grateful that Vincent had Theo’s support. Otherwise, he would have felt so much more alone.

In the garden behind the museum, where Vincent would have played as a boy, we found several fruit trees and tried to guess if one was the almond tree Theo’s descendants had planted there. Vincent had painted his famous blue and white almond-blossom painting when Theo’s son – also named Vincent – was born.

We walked around the town and tried to summon the vibes that Vincent reminisced about later in life, especially when he was sick in France.

“During my illness I again saw each room in the house at Zundert, each path, each plant in the garden, the views round about, the fields, the neighbours, the cemetery, the church, our kitchen garden behind – right up to the magpies’ nest in a tall acacia in the cemetery.”

Deeply religious – he even toyed with becoming a minister – Vincent’s spiritual feelings were tied to his love of nature – trees, flowers, fields and the people who worked them. Even in his later years in France, although the paintings are much brighter and vivid, the subject matter is similar to his Brabant years.

I understood better that he had an eye for ordinary life, captured simply with simple brushstrokes. He had a knack for making ordinary lives and ordinary scenes interesting. I guess that’s why sunflowers – not elegant roses – came to symbolize Vincent.

Etten-Leur

After failed attempts as an apprentice art dealer, teacher, theological student and preacher, Vincent moved back in with his parents in the town of Etten (now called Etten-Leur), where his father had become the minister.  

Sadly, the church where his father preached, now called the Van Gogh Church, was closed when we arrived and not destined to open for several more hours. So, we explored the outdoor Vincent markers.

We saw the old town hall where he registered for the first time as a painter, marking the start of his artistic career. An alley between the church and the old sexton’s house features a large mural with “Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat” surrounded by black-and-white drawings and letters he completed while in Etten. Several window frames displayed paintings between the mullions.

We found a sculpture of Vincent (see top photo) in a garden behind the church, where the family home used to stand and where he had his first studio. He wears a backpack, presumably filled with art supplies. He loved long hikes in the countryside to observe the people who inspired him, then sketch and paint them.

“Diggers, sowers, ploughers, men and women I must now draw constantly,” he wrote to Theo. “Examine and draw everything that’s part of a peasant’s life.”

Years before, I had read a collection of letters Vincent exchanged with Theo, and they made more sense now.

In my earlier years, I had much preferred Claude Monet’s sun-dappled water lilies and apple blossoms. But tastes change as we learn and age and experience more of life. We had seen the original “Starry Night” at MOMA in New York City and my appreciation of Vincent grew. In Ottawa, I had experienced the Beyond Van Gogh show – one of those immersive shows where paintings are cast onto enormous screens, where they morph and move along with music. And in the Netherlands, I discovered the land that had shaped him.

After leaving Etten, Vincent spent two years in The Hague and Drenthe (a northern Dutch province), trying to make a living as an illustrator and lithographer.

Nuenen

Proving that boomerang kids are nothing new, 30-year-old Vincent again moved back in with his parents, who had moved to Nuenen and failed to keep their new address a secret.

During his two years there, Vincent enjoyed one of the most productive periods in his life, feverishly producing about 500 paintings, watercolours, drawings, letters that included sketches, and his first masterpiece – “The Potato Eaters.”

The excellent Van Gogh Village Museum (confusingly also called the Vincentre – I had thought they were two separate places but they’re the same) focuses on “The Potato Eaters” and the time he spent beforehand painting heads and hands, studying weavers at their looms and watching farmers working the fields.

I hadn’t realized that he’d completed two “practice” versions of “The Potato Eaters” before the final one. The first shows only four figures, the second has the fifth figure added; the third and final is the most vibrant, although still dark. I wasn’t sure if that reflected the dark interior lit with gaslights and candles, or Vincent’s shifting moods. Certainly, he seemed excited about his new career as a painter.

“What I think about my own work is that the painting of the peasants eating potatoes that I did in Nuenen is after all the best thing I did,” he wrote.

Vincent’s Lightlab in the Village Museum is fascinating. We pressed buttons, slid panels and watched videos explaining the science behind Vincent’s use of colour and light. He deliberately used colours that would have an effect on one another, tricking the viewer’s brain into seeing other colours. In a painting of a weaver, for example, he used brown paint for the cloth, because with the surrounding dark colours, it looked like the red that it really was.

The museum’s creative exhibits include various tools Vincent used to get perspective right, his drawings of peasants digging and weavers at their looms. One room recreates the Potato Eaters scene, so you can sit in the chairs and become a potato eater yourself. The hands-on exhibits also let you play with a light source to light a still-life of pots and bottles similar to one of Vincent’s paintings.

After a lunch of friet and sausage at the aptly named The Potato Eaters restaurant across the street, we embarked on a walking and driving tour around Nuenen to see the views and stand on the exact spots where Vincent had painted scenes. The town is an open-air museum! (In the museum gift shop, I had purchased an excellent 5-euro guidebook with map showing the 20 sites in and around Nuenen.) 

Tremors of excitement coursed through me as we stood before the little chapel Vincent had painted for his mother when she was sick and couldn’t attend services. And the haystacks in front of a windmill he had included in several peasant paintings. And the watermills. It was like standing inside his paintings.

We also saw: his parents’ home, where Vincent had his studio in an outbuilding at the back; the spot where he had painted “The Potato Eaters” (the actual farmhouse where the De Groot family lived has been replaced and a Mercedes was parked outside); a weaver’s cottage; several churches, windmills and watermills; and the house where his love lived. He and Margot Begemann wanted to marry but both their families objected. Margot was so upset that she swallowed poison.  

An information sign marked each spot with an image of the painting he had created there. It was fun to line up the image with the scene. Many are exactly the same – only the trees have changed, either growing larger or having been cut down.

The Opwetten Watermill (with the largest millwheel in the country; Vincent painted it) has a lovely restaurant behind it. We ate dinner slowly, waiting for darkness so we could enjoy the nearby Van Gogh-Roosegaarde cycle path.

Artist Daan Roosegaarde embedded thousands of phosphorescent stones into the path in the pattern of Vincent’s “Starry Night” skies. The stones charge by day and glow by night. It was almost dark when we got to the 600-metre winding pathway, but it didn’t look special at all. However, half an hour later – it was magical! The stones glowed in shades of blue and green, shining in swirls and waves.  

Kröller-Müller Museum

The fabulous Kröller-Müller Museum has the second-largest collection of Van Gogh originals in the world, after the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

(Although we were in the Netherlands for 3.5 weeks, it was in August when Amsterdam heaves with tourists. We decided to test a theory that you can have a wonderful time in the Netherlands without having to battle the Amsterdam crowds. I did miss seeing the Van Gogh Museum, but otherwise our theory proved true.)

Located within National Park De Hoge Veluwe National Park, theKröller-Müller Museum was founded by Helene Kröller-Müller who loved Van Gogh and had the means to collect about 90 paintings and 180 drawings of his. The museum boasts a wide array of other paintings (e.g. by Claude Monet, Georges Seurat, Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondriaan) plus a vast sculpture garden. But we went to see Vincent’s work.

The centrepiece Van Gogh Gallery displays about 40 works at a time, and I savoured every one of them slowly, reading every description. I found works I’d never seen before, such as “Four Sunflowers Gone to Seed” and many of the peasant head shots. Occasionally I stepped in closely to examine his brushstrokes – thick and quick, swirling, sometimes dotted. Based on what I’d learned in the lightlab in Nuenen, I studied the many colours he used to paint the cobbles in “Terrace of a Café at Night.”

Vincent not only prepared for “The Potato Eaters” by painting dozens of heads and hands, but he also painted two “practice” versions of the large work, including one that hangs in the Kröller-Müller Museum. Among our favourites was “The Garden of the Asylum at Saint-Rémy” (left) and “Olive Grove.”  

Other places

You could devote an entire vacation to visiting all the Dutch towns with connections to Vincent, but we saw the main places where he was born, raised and got his start as an artist. Our next trip to the Netherlands will include Amsterdam in the off-season. (The Van Gogh Europe website is a handy starting point for planning Vincent site-seeing in the Netherlands, Britain, Belgium and France – the four countries where he lived.)

After two years in Nuenen, Vincent left for Belgium, to learn more about painting at the academy in Antwerp, and then on to France. He never returned to the Netherlands, but his heart never left at all. As his career flourished, moving from the dull browns and greys of peasant scenes to the vibrant colours and light that marked his later masterpieces, he suffered from mental illness and homesickness. He painted scenes of his Dutch homes and wrote about his memories growing up there.

No matter how far Vincent travelled, his roots always called him home. Perhaps that’s another reason why I feel an affinity.

We visited the Netherlands in August 2023. Find out where we are right now by visiting our ‘Where’s Kathryn?’ page.