Head of a Man

In October 1884, living again with his parents in the Dutch village of Nuenen, Van Gogh set himself a target on the advice of a painter friend: at least 50 heads of local peasants and weavers, one after another, until he could handle a face. This is one of the last of them, painted in the spring of 1885, when the same models were also feeding the big dark canvas of The Potato Eaters. Who the man is nobody knows. The letters that record almost everything else say next to nothing about the people who sat for him, only that he found them in the village. Two years later, in Paris, Van Gogh turned this canvas over and painted a self-portrait in a straw hat with a pipe on the back, so one piece of cloth now carries a Nuenen labourer on one side and the man who painted him on the other.