Peasant Woman with White Cap

In the winter and spring of 1885 Vincent van Gogh was living in the Brabant village of Nuenen, and he had set himself a stubborn task: to paint the local peasants, one head at a time. He worked through roughly 40 of these studies, faces of the men and women who dug the fields and sat at the looms, all in the brown, earthy tones he thought honest to their lives. This woman in her stiff white linen cap is one of them. The whole campaign was practice for a single ambitious picture, The Potato Eaters, which he finished that spring, five peasants around a lamp and a dish of potatoes. Within a year he would move to Paris, meet the Impressionists, and drop this dark palette almost overnight. Here the brown is still everything, and the only light is on the cap and the woman's brow.