Head of a Woman

Van Gogh spent the winter of 1884 and 1885 in Nuenen, the Brabant village where his father was the Protestant minister, and he was paying farm workers and weavers small sums to sit for him in a room he had taken as a studio. Dozens of heads came out of those months. In his letters they are not portraits of individuals at all, they are types, and what he wanted them to carry was the hard working life of the people around him. The practice fed straight into The Potato Eaters, the big lamplit supper he painted in the same village that spring. There is a small accident on this canvas worth finding. The black dot of her pupil, in the eye over on the right of the picture, shifted after the paint was laid down and settled on her eyelid.