A peasant family share a meal of potatoes by lamplight in Nuenen, in the Dutch countryside. Van Gogh wanted to show people who, as he wrote, had “dug the earth with the very hands they are putting in the dish”. It was his first major painting.

He deliberately made the hands and faces coarse and the colors earthy, “the color of a really dusty potato”. Critics, and even friends, thought it was ugly. He considered it one of his best.