Woman with a Mourning Shawl

In the winter of 1884 and 1885 Vincent van Gogh was living in the Dutch village of Nuenen, where his father was the pastor, and he had set himself a stubborn project. He wanted to paint the local farm workers, the people who dug and wove and ate by lamplight, so he paid them a few coins to sit for him and worked through some 40 heads that winter. He called the group heads of the people. This dark study of a woman in a heavy shawl is one of them. He was not after a flattering likeness. He wanted the weight of a hard life in the face, the coarse features and the shadowed eyes, painted in the browns of the earth these people worked. That spring the studies fed into his first large canvas, The Potato Eaters.