Vincent van Gogh painted what he considered his first masterpiece, The Potato Eaters, in the Brabant village of Nuenen in 1885. He wanted his figure painting to express the harshness of rural life, while simultaneously showing the world what he had to offer as an artist.
Working in the artistic tradition of ‘the meagre meal’, Van Gogh painted a peasant family in a poorly lit room in which two moments of communal eating are combined: koffiedrinken (literally ‘coffee-drinking’), which was a light meal with bread at around six in the evening, and a simple meal of potatoes left over from midday, eaten around nine. Various members of the De Groot family posed for the painting, for which Van Gogh used a dark palette of earth colours and gave the figures weatherbeaten faces and coarse, bony hands. Several objects can be seen on the wall behind them, including a framed colour print with a ‘household blessing’.
Kees Rovers, who lives in Nuenen, has been collecting objects that appear in Van Gogh’s Brabant paintings for some time now and he recently acquired two different household blessings. Which one was it, though, that Vincent depicted? The historian and ethnologist Gerard Rooijakkers decided to find out and has been able to show that it was a devotional print from the pilgrimage site of Kevelaer. In this article he describes the significance of household blessings in Brabant Catholic culture.
Detail of a lightened version of The Potato Eaters, in which elements of the clock and the print can be seen.
Household blessing from Kevelaer in The Potato Eaters
Article by Gerard Rooijakkers
In the left background of The Potato Eaters a framed print hangs on the wall between the clock and the veurste gebont – the ‘first roof truss’ near – and hence associated with – the bedstead. The picture is a ‘household blessing’ intended to protect the house from evil.
Around 1840, a process of ‘devotionalization’ began in the Catholic Church. In the homes of simple farmers, weavers and rural labourers in the southeast of the Dutch province of Brabant, it led to the appearance of religious objects intended for worship: framed prints, vials of holy water and rosaries were placed around the bedstead in particular to ensure that the day began and ended in the realm of the sacred.
These were ritual acts that placed the De Groot family within the group parish culture of the time, under the pastoral care of the priest, Mijnheer pastoor. Demonstrative – not to say triumphalist – processions and pilgrimages were likewise typical of popular Catholic culture at the time. Catholic families were large too, so that a couple with lots of children was said to have ‘farmed well beneath the first truss’.
Procession from Eindhoven to Kevelaer
Catholic congregations took part in an annual pilgrims’ procession to Kevelaer, no less than fifty-seven kilometres east of Eindhoven in the ancient Land of Cleves, to worship the Virgin Mary as Consolatrix afflictorum (‘Consoler of the Afflicted’) as her Latin title had it.
It was not an easy journey to make alone, if you did not have the necessary resources and so a kind of travel agent avant-la-lettre was available to help in the shape of a pilgrimage brotherhood called the ‘Eindhoven Procession’. Established in 1742 (precisely a hundred years after the cult in Kevelaer was founded), it had a dedicated starting point in Nuenen, where a Broedermeester (‘Brother Master’) served as the official contact for would-be pilgrims.
The pilgrimage (bevert) began on the first Thursday after Ascension (15 August), with a long line of people making their way to the sanctuary on foot, praying and singing as they went. A few carriages and carts were also laid on for those too old or infirm to walk. The pilgrims spent a night at Oostrum/Venray, before arriving at their destination the following day.
Pilgrim’s booklet with the bishop’s rules and travelling songs. Nuenen was one of the ‘subordinate places’ on the pilgrimage to Kevelaer (Museum ’t Oude Slot, Veldhoven).
The Pilgrimage Brotherhood
It was a significant journey, therefore, and since any leisure time was basically linked to Church holidays in that period, it amounted to an accessible and religiously endorsed vacation. Fewer men than women tended to make the pilgrimage, which was especially popular among young people looking for a sweetheart. Long before the appearance of dating apps like Tinder, Kevelaer was a serious wedding market. The ecclesiastical authorities increasingly resisted the inevitable frivolous excesses that occurred while far from home – certainly towards the end of the nineteenth century – by closer supervision and a devotional programme designed to fill up the day.
It is in this light, therefore, that we ought to view the transformation of the Eindhoven Procession in 1894 into the Eindhoven-Kevelaer Pilgrimage Brotherhood, with the official blessing of the Bishop of Den Bosch. The Brotherhood exists to this day, which says a great deal about the lasting popularity of this traditional folk devotion.
Eindhoven was still really a small municipality at the time, hardly worth the word city, in which the Philips brothers, founders of the company that bears their name to this day, launched their business in 1891. It is a market town, where local agriculture led to the foundation of an important farmer’s lending cooperative (Coöperatieve Centrale Boerenleenbank) in 1898, as well as to a popular cult around St Nicholas of Tolentino – featuring consecrated bread rolls to protect against cattle disease – which Augustinian monks established that same year. An ideal town and region, then, for a ‘peasant painter’ like Vincent van Gogh.
Souvenirs and devotional prints
Devotional prints of St Nicholas of Tolentino were available from the Augustinian church in Eindhoven, while pilgrims to Kevelaer traditionally brought back a triangular pilgrim’s pennant and a household blessing. Another typical religious souvenir from Kevelaer was a rebus print that visualized and described Christ’s Passion in a light-hearted way. The pictures meant that illiterate people could follow the story too. Additional sacred power was instilled by buying these items in situ and having them blessed there by a priest. In other words, objects of this kind held a magic charge.
Rebus print ‘The Story of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ’, colour lithograph of c. 1880, which was frequently purchased in Kevelaer at the same time as the household blessing (Maas-Rooijakkers Collection, Museum ’t Oude Slot, Veldhoven).
Pilgrim’s pennant ‘Andenken an Kevelaer’, colour lithograph of c. 1895 that could be attached to a stick to make a little flag (Maas-Rooijakkers Collection, Museum ’t Oude Slot, Veldhoven).
Pantry of c. 1885 with a typical devotional arrangement; a household blessing on the inside of the door (pasted here onto a separate piece of card because of its size), a Madonna under a glass dome at the top and, on either side, a decorative glass candlestick with mercury in which a pilgrim’s pennant has been inserted (Maas-Rooijakkers Collection, Museum ’t Oude Slot, Veldhoven).
Two for the price of one
On the way home, pilgrims’ pennants were flown from the horses’ harness or inserted on a hat. In later years, they were used as bicycle flags too. For its part, the household blessing was traditionally pasted to the inside of a cupboard door. In the case of better-off farmers, this would have been the cammenet, the cabinet in the ‘best room’, which consisted of a lower part with three drawers and an upper part with large, panelled doors and a crest.
Catholic farm labourers like the De Groots in Nuenen would not have owned such a fine piece of furniture and so they pasted their household blessing on the inside of their pantry (schapraai) door. This cupboard was the height of a man and had two narrow, panelled doors. There was occasionally a drawer at the top of the pantry, but this was more usually located below the shelf at waist height.
The pantry doors were generally too narrow for the whole of the blessing to be pasted on the inside, and so the sheet of paper – which actually comprised two separate prints – was designed so that it could be cut in two. It was also common, though, for the cut-off part of the print to be framed separately: two for the price of one, as it were.
Religious wallpaper
Around 1885, the house blessings sold in Kevelaer cost half a penny (stuiver). Back in 1830 or so, the price had been one cent and earlier still, before Napoleon annexed the Low Countries, it was one oortje (equivalent to 0.0125 cents). As a result, they are sometimes called ‘catchpenny prints’ (oortjes- or centsprenten).
To maintain the magical, protective power of house blessings they could be ‘refreshed’ on each new pilgrimage to Kevelaer. Old prints on the backs of cupboard doors or, as in the De Groots’ home, in picture frames, were replaced with fresh ones, ideally pasted over the old print, as a kind of religious wallpaper. In this way, their perceived protective charge would accumulate.
The prints are an example of ‘functional graphics’ which, while printed in large runs, were then mostly ‘used up’ in practice, which is why historians describe them as ‘ephemeral’ printed matter. Hence the notorious ‘graphic paradox’, according to which the larger the original print-run, the slimmer the chance of copies actually surviving. Because of this, historical popular printed matter is relatively rare.
Complete, uncut household blessing with the Virgin of Scherpenheuvel. Stencil-coloured woodcut of c. 1870 with two prints clearly visible on a single sheet measuring 344 x 430 mm (Maas-Rooijakkers Collection, Museum ’t Oude Slot, Veldhoven).
The household blessing in The Potato Eaters
As ‘good Catholics’, members of the De Groot family from rural Nuenen are sure to have made the pilgrimage on foot to Kevelaer at least once and will have brought a household blessing home with them. Price was certainly no deterrent. How can we be sure, though, that their blessing came from that particular place, rather than another popular pilgrimage site, such as Scherpenheuvel in Flemish Brabant? To answer this question, we have to examine the iconography of the traditional and formally very consistent household blessings produced in these respective places.
In both instances, the print on the left half of the sheet was dedicated to the focus of the local cult: Our Lady of Scherpenheuvel or Our Lady of Kevelaer. Each is a processional or ‘pole’ Madonna, the body of which consists of a wide, conical cloak. She holds a sceptre in her right hand and the Christ Child with her left arm. The skyline, by contrast, is different: prints from Scherpenheuvel show the famous domed basilica, those from Kevelaer the small chapel with its sprawling complex of devotional buildings.
Den Godzaligen Huis-Segen van Kevelaer, kleurenlitho uit circa 1880 (Collectie Maas-Rooijakkers, Museum ’t Oude Slot, Veldhoven).
As noted, however, only the right half of the household blessing is depicted in The Potato Eaters. It shows Mount Calvary or Golgotha (literally ‘Place of the Skull’, hence the skull in the picture), which does not in itself give us much to go on. Fortunately, there is a tell-tale difference between the way Calvary was represented at the two locations.
At the foot of the cross, prints from Scherpenheuvel include the Archduke Albert and the Infanta Isabella, founders of the cult there, or else a kneeling Virgin Mary on her own, her hands clasped on her knees. With her loose-hanging hair, she looks more like Mary Magdalene at first glance, but her ointment-pot attribute is missing. Prints from Kevelaer invariably show Mary and St John standing beneath the cross, and this is the configuration we find in the household blessing painted by Van Gogh.
Crucifixion with the text of a Geestelijke huiszegen; right half of a household blessing from Kevelaer, colour lithograph of c. 1895 (Kees Rovers Collection, Nuenen). This is the type of print Van Gogh incorporated in The Potato Eaters.
Crucifixion with the text of De Godzalige huiszegen; right half of a household blessing from Scherpenheuvel, colour lithograph of c. 1895 (Kees Rovers Collection, Nuenen).
Crucifixion with Den Godzaligen huys-zegen, stencil-coloured woodcut printed at Brepols in Turnhout around 1815. This item, like the one in The Potato Eaters, was cut off at the time (Maas-Rooijakkers Collection, Museum ’t Oude Slot, Veldhoven).
Ritual function
Household blessings like this should not be interpreted as wall decoration: indeed, they were often kept out of sight, only revealed when the cupboard door was opened. This certainly happened when a storm blew up, driving the family indoors to huddle around the table. According to popular belief, shiny objects attracted lightning strikes and so items like cutlery were stored away in a drawer and mirrors covered or turned to face the wall. While mother stayed inside with the children and recited the words of the house blessing (or of a standard prayer if she could not read), father went outside with holy water and a palm branch to bless the corners of the house.
In other words, household blessings served a ritual function as a means of warding off misfortune. The dwellers of this house were to be protected, so the Kevelaer house blessing informs us (the text varying according to the time), ‘from sin and all evil’, more specifically earthquake, disease, plague, fever and the effects of water and fire. Interestingly, black magic is no longer mentioned in these blessings, unlike the ones from Scherpenheuvel, in which the list of catastrophes concludes firmly with ‘sorcery and demonic scum’.
Vincent's father, the Protestant minister Theodorus van Gogh, must have detested all these ‘Romish’ superstitions in Nuenen. His illustrious predecessor at the vicarage in Nuenen, Stephanus Hanewinckel, made no attempt to conceal his aversion in his anti-papist tract Reize door de Meierij (‘Journey through the Bailiwick’) in 1799:
‘In every house of the Papists is also found a so-called Household Blessing, to wit a depiction of a crucified Christ, alongside which an, in many respects blasphemous, prayer can be read.’
Devotional prints were also pasted to the inside of chest lids, as in this rare example from 1798, with a household blessing from Kevelaer on the far right (Maas-Rooijakkers Collection, Museum ’t Oude Slot, Veldhoven).
Characteristic colours
Bright colours were typical for these popular prints, which originally consisted of woodcuts coloured with patches of eye-catching red, blue and yellow applied by finger or thumb. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the introduction of colour or chromolithography meant that household blessings too could be printed in large runs, in which the typically intense colours were retained. This was evidently to the taste of the buyers, since it was now technically possible to print much more subtle colours.
Van Goghs Bloeiende pruimenboomgaard (1887), geïnspireerd op een Japanse prent van Hiroshige.
Colourful woodcuts
It is no coincidence that Van Gogh reproduced the bright colours of the print in what is otherwise a relatively monochrome painting. He was a real admirer of religious and secular woodcuts and popular prints of this kind, which he no doubt got to know during his time at the Blussé and Van Braam shop in Dordrecht, where he worked for a while as an errand boy in the winter of 1877. Like so many of Vincent’s jobs, this one – arranged for him by his Uncle Cent (1820–1888) – did not prove successful. All the same, he enthused in his letters about the woodcuts, lithographs and children’s pictures he saw there.
Not long after he completed The Potato Eaters, which he himself considered his first masterpiece, he assembled a collection of no fewer than 660 colourful Japanese woodcuts in the winter of 1886–87 in Paris. His intention was actually to sell them on, but while there was a mania for all things Japanese at the time, this venture too came to nothing. He could still draw on the woodcuts for inspiration, however, and he painted versions of several of them or else included them in the background of self-portraits.
Van Gogh’s collection of Japanese colour woodcuts has survived and is now in Amsterdam. Anyone interested in their Dutch equivalents, including a representative collection of household blessings and pilgrims’ pennants (often well used), can find them in the popular print collection at Museum ’t Oude Slot in Veldhoven.
Kees Rovers’ collection can be viewed by appointment in the workshop adjacent to his house in Nuenen, not far from the vicarage and the Van Gogh Village Museum. It is a historically significant spot, as it was once the home of the carpenter Theodorus de Vries, who did many an odd job for the Reverend Van Gogh and also made frames and stretchers for his artist son.
Gerard Rooijakkers (Eindhoven 1962) is an ethnologist who has previously published on Van Gogh in ‘De beeldenmakelaar. Vincent van Gogh en de materiële cultuur van Nuenense wevers en boeren’, in: G.J.M. van den Brink & W.Th.M. Frijhoff (eds.), De wevers en Vincent van Gogh (Zwolle 1990) 36–53 and ‘Snackbar Van Gogh’, in: Jong Holland 19 (2003) 27–29. He is co-author with Cor van der Heijden of a book on artist-photographers in the Kempen region, titled Kempische boeren en Vlaamse vissers. Kunstenaars en volkscultuur omstreeks 1885: Victor de Buck en Joseph Gindra (Eindhoven 1993).
Literatuur
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Maurits de Meyer, De volks- en kinderprent in de Nederlanden van de 15e tot de 20e eeuw (Antwerpen 1962)
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Nico Boerma e.a., Kinderprenten, volksprenten, centsprenten, schoolprenten, populaire grafiek in de Nederlanden 1650-1950 (Nijmegen 2014)
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W.H.Th. Knippenberg, Devotionalia. Religieuze voorwerpen uit het katholieke leven (2 dln., Eindhoven 1985)
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Walther van Halen, 'De devotionalisering van de katholieke gelovigen in oostelijk Noord-Brabant, 1830-1920’, in J. van Oudheusden & G. Trienekens (red.), Een pront wijf, een mager paard en een zoon op het seminarie. Aanzetten tot een integrale geschiedenis van oostelijk Noord-Brabant 1770-1914 (’s-Hertogenbosch 1993) 185-209.
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Gerard Rooijakkers, ‘De dynamiek van devotionalia. De materiële cultuur van het geleefde geloof in oostelijk Noord-Brabant’, in: M. Monteiro, G. Rooijakkers & J. Rosendaal (red.), De dynamiek van religie en cultuur. Geschiedenis van het Nederlands katholicisme (Kampen 1993) 80-106.
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Gerard Rooijakkers, 'Cult Circuits in the Southern Netherlands. Mediators between Heaven and Earth’, in: M. Holsbeke (ed.), The object as mediator. On the Transcendental Meaning of Art in Traditional Cultures (Antwerpen 1996) 19-47.
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Marc Wingens, Over de grens. De bedevaart van katholieke Nederlanders in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw (Nijmegen 1994)