Head of a Woman

Van Gogh was hunting one particular colour in Nuenen that spring. He had been painting peasant faces with yellow ochre, red ochre and white, and judged the result far too light for people who were outdoors in every weather. What he wanted, he told his brother Theo in a letter of 30 April 1885, was the colour of a really dusty potato, unpeeled. In the same letter he repeated a line he liked about Jean-François Millet, the French painter of farm labour, that his peasants seem to have been painted with the soil they sow. Who this woman was is not recorded. His sitters were neighbours from the village, and only a few of them, like the farm girl Gordina de Groot, can still be matched to a name.