The Potaot Eaters - Vincent van Gogh

As described by Irving Stone in Lust for Life :
Van Gogh visited the nearby living De Groot family on a number of successive evenings, painting them while they were eating their usual dinner of potatoes.
Every time he viewed his effort back at home van Gogh dismissed it as a failure and discarded it. Finally, the night before leaving from Nuenen (in the Dutch province of Brabant) for Paris, he realised that he had been too close up to the scene in the cramped hut. He painted it then and there from memory and got it absolutely perfect.