Head of a Peasant Woman

By the middle of May 1885 the big picture was behind him. Van Gogh had spent that spring in the Brabant village of Nuenen painting head after head of the local farm workers, then worked them up into a lamplit supper scene, The Potato Eaters, finished in April. This head came after it, around 15 May. He wanted a type rather than a likeness, a face of the sort he admired in the French painter Millet, low forehead and heavy lips, and he wrote that his heads ought to come out more true to type, that is, more felt. The hair is gathered under a small cap and the features are set down so bluntly that the sitter has more than once been taken for a man. Behind her is a night sky, with trees barely visible on either side of the face.