Head of a Man

In the late winter of 1885, in the Dutch village of Nuenen, Van Gogh set himself a stubborn task. He wanted to paint dozens of local peasants, one head after another, until he could catch a working face straight from life, aiming for around 50 of them. This is one. The man is lit hard from one side, the background left dark and open, so the weathered face has to carry the whole picture. Van Gogh was chasing character rather than flattery, gathering these blunt, earthy heads as studies for his first big composition, The Potato Eaters, which he finished that spring. The brown, smoky colour here is the painter he was before Paris. Within a year he would move there, fall in with the Impressionists, and let those browns burn off into open colour.