Head of a Woman

Through the winter of 1884 and the following spring, Van Gogh walked into peasant cottages around the Brabant village of Nuenen and painted whoever would sit for him. More than 40 of those heads survive, this one among them. He was drilling himself into becoming a figure painter, and it cost money he did not have, because models had to be paid. His letters to his brother Theo that winter keep coming back to the same request, and in one of them he reports that some of the promised heads are finished but not yet dry enough to roll up and send to Paris. He worked in the huts rather than in his studio, in whatever light the small windows gave, and the whole series carries that dimness in the background.