Cabeza de mujer

Van Gogh painted this in 1885 in Nuenen, the Dutch village where his father was the Protestant minister. Over that winter he set out to paint the local peasants, and turned out around 40 studies of their heads, working from the farm families in their cottages. He wanted them dark, coarse, and unglamorous, the colour of earth and boiled potatoes, and he insisted that prettified painting had no truth in it. These heads were practice with a purpose. They fed directly into the large picture he was building toward, The Potato Eaters, a peasant family at their evening meal, which is often called the first real achievement of his short career. At this point he had never seen the bright Impressionist painting already remaking art in Paris, and had not yet used those colours himself. The study is now in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.