Beneath a starry night: Celebrating Van Gogh's 162nd birthday

[Photo/Xinhua]

The Potato Eaters

The Potato Eaters is an oil painting created in 1885 in the Netherlands. Van Gogh said he wanted to depict peasants as they really were. He once wrote letters to his brother Theo to describe this painting, "You see, I really have wanted to make it so that people get the idea that these folk, who are eating their potatoes by the light of their little lamp, have tilled the earth themselves with these hands they are putting in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labor and — that they have thus honestly earned their food. I wanted it to give the idea of a wholly different way of life from ours — civilized people. So I certainly don’t want everyone just to admire it or approve of it without knowing why." The Potato Eaters is now in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.