Head of a Woman

This head is one of about 40 peasant portraits Van Gogh painted from life in Nuenen, the Brabant village where he was then living with his parents, most of them between the winter of 1884 and the spring of 1885. They follow a single plan. The sitter is shown from the shoulders up, straight on or in profile, against a dark ground, in the clothes worked in every day. Winter was what made it possible, since there was little to do in the fields and neighbours would sit for a small payment. The ambition behind the series came from the English illustrated weeklies he had collected in the 1870s, which ran long runs of ordinary working faces under the heading Heads of the People. In January 1885 he wrote home about the women of the village, how hard their white caps were to paint and how beautiful he found them.