Head of a Peasant Woman

In 2013 Britain launched the Cultural Gifts Scheme, which lets a living owner give a work of art to the nation in return for a tax reduction. This head was the first painting to reach the National Gallery that way, from a private collector who stayed anonymous. Until then every Van Gogh in the gallery came from his last years in France, and there was nothing from his Dutch beginnings. She sat for him in Nuenen, the Brabant village where he painted around 40 heads of local people over the winter of 1884 to 1885. He wanted broad, rough faces with low foreheads, full and Millet-like as he put it, after the French painter of peasants. Hers is young and evenly lit under a dark cap, with large dark eyes, painted more lightly than the heads in The Potato Eaters, the supper scene he was working toward.