Head of a Peasant Woman with White Cap

Van Gogh painted this head around March 1885 in Nuenen, the Brabant village where his father was the Protestant minister. That winter he worked in two rooms he rented as a studio from the sexton of the village's Catholic church. On the evening of 26 March his father came home, stepped through the door of the parsonage and collapsed, dead of a stroke. Van Gogh went on painting heads. This one shows how he was working: the face built up in orange and brick red, the shadows pushed toward greenish brown, and the white cap laid on in thick, pale strokes that hold most of the light in the picture. His sister Anna thought their mother would have more peace without him in the house, and in May he moved out of the parsonage for good and lived in the studio.