Head of a Young Peasant in a Peaked Cap

Through the winter of 1884 and into 1885 Van Gogh was living in the Brabant village of Nuenen, in the south of the Netherlands, and he set himself a plain, stubborn task: to paint the heads of the local farm workers one after another, straight from life. He made around 40 of them, most much like this one, the face seen close against a dark ground, the sitter in everyday working clothes and, here, a peaked cap pulled low over the brow. He wanted rough, weathered, real faces rather than pretty ones, and he kept his colours dark and earthy to match. All that practice was heading somewhere. That spring the studies fed into his first ambitious picture, The Potato Eaters, a group of these same Nuenen peasants sharing a meal by lamplight.