The New Potato Eaters

In 2013/14 Huxter was awarded an Arts Council grant and spent a total of 7 weeks painting twenty two portraits, from life, of the inhabitants of a Dutch town where Vincent van Gogh lived and worked. His paintings were a contemporary response to Van Gogh’s work and featured some of the descendants of the sitters in his famous early masterpiece, The Potato Eaters. The twenty two portraits that Huxter produced in Holland form the series The New Potato Eaters and feature in the book The New Potato Eaters published by the Stockholm Arts Festival ‘O/Modernt’, and Cambridge University Press in 2015. The book explores the links between Van Gogh and British portraiture.

Top left: Zus (2013), oil on canvas, 40.6 x 30.5 cm

Top centre: Adjei (2013), oil on canvas, 40.6 x 35.6 cm

Top right: Ton in his studio (2013), oil on canvas, 40.6 x 35.6 cm

Bottom left: Niels (2013), oil on canvas, 40.6 x 30.5 cm

Bottom centre: The De Groot boys with an Ancestor (2013), oil on canvas, 40.6 x 45.7 cm

Bottom right: Eric (2013), oil on canvas, 40.6 x 35.6 cm