Head of a Woman

Through the winter of 1884 and into the spring of 1885, Van Gogh worked his way through the cottages around Nuenen painting one peasant head after another, about 40 of them in all. This is one of that run. He was not after handsome faces. He wanted the weathered, broad-boned look of people who worked the land, and he said plainly he preferred the coarse, unpolished features to anything prettier. All of it was building toward a single picture. In May 1885 he finished The Potato Eaters, a dim room of farm workers gathered around a plate of potatoes, and these heads were his rehearsal for it. The colours here are the earth tones of that whole Dutch stretch, browns and dull greens laid on thick, a face coming out of the shadow. The full-size study he made for The Potato Eaters hangs in this same museum.