Head of a Woman

Of all the peasants who sat for Van Gogh in the Brabant village of Nuenen, this is the only one whose name has come down to us: Gordina de Groot, born in 1855 and so almost exactly the painter's age. She lived with her family in a cottage he visited constantly through the winter and spring of 1885, and she posed for him again and again. She also sits at the table in The Potato Eaters, finished that May. Theo van Gogh, his younger brother and a picture dealer in Paris, took this small study back with him at the end of March 1885. By the autumn the arrangement in the village had soured. Gordina was pregnant, local gossip attached Vincent's name to it, and the parish priest told his congregation to stop sitting for him.