Head of a Peasant Woman with Dark Cap

The Orsay calls this small canvas simply Tête de paysanne hollandaise, a Dutch peasant woman's head, and it is one of very few Van Goghs in the museum from the years before he ever set foot in France. He painted it in 1884 in the Brabant village of Nuenen, while he was working through a long run of heads of the farm people around him. She is seen in strict profile, a red cap pulled low over her brow, a white collar at her throat, her face built from warm earthy strokes against a dark ground flecked with green. It reached Paris by a roundabout route. It first belonged to a collector in The Hague, then crossed the Atlantic to the Thannhauser gallery in New York, and in 1954 the French national museums bought it there with money from an anonymous Canadian donation.