Five Unmissable Paintings at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

This is unlikely to be the first painting that anyone would associate with Van Gogh, but it is one of the works which cemented his reputation as a serious artist. No swirling skies, sunflowers or irises here, but a rustic, realist scene depicting a peasant family having dinner, in the vein of Gustave Courbet or Jean-Francois Millet. Not only are the subjects eating potatoes, but Van Gogh apparently modelled their faces on unpeeled potatoes to capture the unglamorous nature of the rural folk. Zoom in and take a look for yourself!

Painted just weeks before he took his own life, there’s been much debate amongst scholars about whether this is the last artwork ever produced by Van Gogh. It’s almost impossible to look at this painting without baring this context in mind. Crows have traditionally been seen as symbols of death, while the green and red path which cuts through the golden wheatfields seems to lead straight into the sky, or the heavens.

Van Gogh painted several different versions of this still life of sunflowers in a vase during his time in Arles in southern France, where he lived and worked with Paul Gauguin. Van Gogh enjoyed experimenting with new pigments of yellow for his series, and the paintings were hung up as decoration in the house which the two artists shared for a few months in 1888.

Van Gogh and Gauguin had quite a turbulent friendship, and the two argued constantly when they lived together in Arles. This portrait of the former by the latter was produced only a few weeks before they fell out for good. Van Gogh was apparently quite displeased with this painting which he felt depicted him as a vagrant with sunken eyes and neck that’s shrinking into his coat. We can also speculate that the perspective— we’re looking down on Van Gogh for above— might reveal something about how Gaugin saw his friend.

Van Gogh was greatly influenced by Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock art, and the compositional flatness, chromatic boldness and floral patterning,which he learned from the likes of Hokusai, can be seen in a number of his paintings, including this portrait of the wife of a postman at Arles. Madame Roulin is seen here holding a piece of string, possibly attached to a cradle which she’s rocking. The subject’s saturated yellow face suggests that Van Gogh wasn’t too interested in capturing an accurate likeness of the sitter, but rather he wanted to paint a more general, universal portrait of motherhood.