Head of a Woman

In the winter of 1884 Van Gogh was living with his parents in Nuenen, a village in the Dutch province of Brabant, and paying local farm workers a little to sit for him. He painted around 40 of these heads, peasant men and women in their everyday working clothes set against dark backgrounds, in deliberately rough, earthy colours, years before he found the bright palette of the south of France. The studies were practice for his first ambitious picture, 'The Potato Eaters', which he finished the following spring. Of that painting he wrote that he wanted the skin to look like the colour of a very dusty potato.