Tête de paysan

While he was living in London in his early 20s, Van Gogh collected cheap English magazine prints, and one run of them in The Graphic stayed with him, a series of portraits of working people under the title Heads of the People. Ten years later, back with his parents in the Brabant village of Nuenen, he set out to do the same thing in paint. Through the winter of 1884 and into the following spring he worked through some 40 heads of farm labourers and weavers, paying his neighbours small sums to sit for him. This is one of that group. The studies fed directly into The Potato Eaters, which he finished in April 1885 and thought his best work so far. Of all those sitters only one name is recorded, a young woman from a weaver's family called Gordina de Groot.