Head of a Woman (KM 111.262)

Through the winter of 1884 and into 1885, Van Gogh painted head after head of the peasants around Nuenen, about 40 of them in all, working straight from life in their cottages. This study of a peasant woman is one of that run. He was not after a flattering likeness. He admired the French painter Jean-Francois Millet, who had built his art on farm labourers, and he wanted these Brabant faces shown coarse and weathered, the way the land had made them. The palette is deliberately dark and earthy, browns and dull greens close to the tone of the room. Around this time he wrote that he wanted a colour like a dusty, unpeeled potato. These heads were the groundwork for the large picture of peasants at supper he would paint that spring.