Peter Pollack set out on his journey with Vincent Willem sixty years after the artist's death, starting his photographic mission in the small Dutch town of Nuenen, where Vincent Van Gogh first began painting. During his two years at Nuenen Van Gogh lived in his parents' vicarage, where a small addition to the house served as the artist's studio.
Van Gogh's first major painting composition, The Potato Eaters, was completed during his time in Nuenen and aptly represents his early style, one heavily influenced by peasant-genre painters like Jean-François Millet and by Dutch artists who traditionally tended towards a dark color palette. Pollack photographed the house in which the potato eaters lived, along with other significant local buildings like the town's church, but, more importantly, he also captured images of the local people. "It wasn't a documentary record I was after," Pollack later explained, but "rather a study of the Dutch landscape and its people, from which Vincent drew the inspiration for his art."
Particularly notable are his photographs of the "birds nest boys," men who in their younger days retrieved bird nests from high up in the trees of Nuenen for Van Gogh to paint in exchange for twenty-five Dutch cents. One of the men musingly recalled being offered one of Van Gogh's paintings on one occasion in lieu of small change, a proposal he refused, opting instead for the immediate gratification of the monetary reward.
- Peter Pollack. Vicarage at Nuenen. Photograph. 1949.
- Peter Pollack. Birds Nest Boys. Photograph. 1949.
- Marc Edo Tralbaut. Vincent Van Gogh. London: Macmillan, 1974.
- Bogomila Welsh. Van Gogh: The Vicarage at Nuenen. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1982.
- Peter Pollack. Peasant in the Fields. Photograph. 1949.
- Peter Pollack. Home of the Potato Eaters. Photograph. 1949.