Portrait of Gijsbertus de Groot

Van Gogh painted this in Nuenen in the second half of March 1885, the weeks his father died. Theodorus van Gogh was the village's Protestant minister, and he collapsed at the parsonage door on 26 March. Vincent was deep in a winter of peasant heads by then, around 47 of them, most of them finished fast in a single sitting. This one went on wet into wet, the darks first and the lights last, against a pale green that rings the head. His sitters came from local farming families, among them the De Groots, whose kitchen he used a few weeks later for The Potato Eaters. The museum in Kansas City has long called this man Gijsbertus de Groot, and now says the identification cannot be confirmed. By that autumn the Catholic priest of Nuenen had told his parishioners to stop sitting for the minister's son, and the series ended.