Spud in the Arts
Potatoes
and Fine Art
Vincent van Gogh
Gogh, Vincent (Willem) van (b. March 30, 1853,
Zundert, Neth.--d. July 29, 1890, Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris). Generally
considered the greatest Dutch painter after Rembrandt, van Gogh powerfully
influenced the Expressionist movement in modern art. His work, all produced
during a 10 year period, hauntingly conveys through its striking color, coarse
brushwork, and contoured forms, the anguish of a mental illness that eventually
resulted in suicide. Among his masterpieces are numerous self-portraits and the
well-known The Starry Night (1889). [Encyclopaedia
Britannica, 1994]
Van Gogh's uncle was a partner in the
international firm of picture dealers Goupil and Co. and, in 1869, van Gogh went
to work in the branch at The Hague. Sent to the London branch in 1873, he fell
unsuccessfully in love with the daughter of his landlady. His unrequited passion
affected him so badly that he was dismissed from his job and he returned to the
Continent. This was the first of several disastrous attempts to find happiness
with a woman.
In 1876, he returned to England as an unpaid
assistant at a school, and his experience of urban squalor awakened a religious
zeal and a longing to serve his fellow men. Following in his father's footsteps
(a Protestant pastor), van Gogh began to train for the ministry, but he
abandoned his studies in 1878. He went to work as a lay preacher among the
impoverished miners of the grim Borinage district in Belgium. In his zeal he
gave away his own worldly goods to the poor and was dismissed for his literal
interpretation of Christ's teaching. He remained in the Borinage, suffering both
acute poverty and a spiritual crisis.
Then, in 1880, he found that art was his
vocation and the means by which he could bring consolation to humanity. From
this time he worked at his new `mission' with single-minded frenzy. Although he
often suffered from extreme poverty and undernourishment, his output in the ten
remaining years of his life was prodigious: about 800 paintings and a similar
number of drawings.
The Potato
Eaters
1885 (180 Kb); Oil on canvas, 81.5 x 114.5 cm;
Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam
From 1881 to 1885 van Gogh lived in the
Netherlands, sometimes in lodgings, supported by his devoted brother Theo, who
regularly sent him money from his own small salary. He painted peasants and
workers, the most famous picture from this period being The Potato Eaters
(Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; 1885). Of this painting he wrote to Theo:
`I have tried to emphasize that those people,
eating their potatoes in the lamp-light have dug the earth with those very hands
they put in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labor, and how they have
honestly earned their food'.
In 1885 van Gogh moved to Antwerp on the advice
of Antoine Mauve (a cousin by marriage), and studied for some months at the
Academy there. Academic instruction had little to offer such an individualist,
however, and in February 1886 he moved to Paris, where he met Pissarro, Degas,
Gauguin, Seurat, and Toulouse-Lautrec. At this time his painting underwent a
violent metamorphosis under the combined influence of Impressionism and Japanese
woodcuts, losing its moralistic flavor of social realism. Van Gogh became
obsessed by the symbolic and expressive values of colors and began to use them
for this purpose rather than, as did the Impressionists, for the reproduction of
visual appearances, atmosphere, and light. `Instead of trying to reproduce
exactly what I have before my eyes,' he wrote, `I use color more
arbitrarily so as to express myself more forcibly'.
Poetry and
Prose
William
Shakespeare had one of his characters proclaim, in The Merry Wives of
Windsor,
"Let the
sky rain potatoes!"
Some people of Shakespeare's time thought that
potatoes were an aphrodisiac!
In the late 16th Century, potatoes
were still a rare and expensive delicacy. In a play of the period, a young man
shows off by ordering the most expensive foods:
"Caviar, sturgeon, anchovies, pickle-oysters;
yes, and a potato pie."
An Irish poet named Bryant wrote this poem:
“They make the boys stout, and they keep the
girls slender,
They soften the heart and they strengthen the mind;
And the man from the bog, or the lord in high splendor,
All live by potatoes, as all folks can find.”
"What I say is that, if a fellow really likes
potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow." A.A. Milne
"Mashed potatoes are to give everybody enough"
-- from A Hole is to Dig by Ruth Krauss
Potato Music
"Mashed Potato Time" - a best selling
1962 record for Dee Dee Sharp
"Potato Head Blues" - by jazz artist
Louis Armstrong
"Ketchup
Loves Potatoes" and "Bud the Spud"
