Tête de paysanne au bonnet sombre

Through the winter of 1884 and into 1885, in the Dutch village of Nuenen, Van Gogh set out to become a painter of peasants. This is one of roughly 40 heads he made from local farmhands and their wives, each shown from the shoulders up against a dark ground, in the caps and jackets they actually worked in. He was drilling himself. All of it was preparation for one ambitious group picture, The Potato Eaters, which he finished in 1885, a lamp-lit scene of five workers sharing a plate of potatoes. There is no bright color here yet. He wanted these faces the color of the earth and the unpeeled potatoes the sitters ate, and he mixed his paint dark on purpose. The plain dark cap is the everyday headgear of a working woman in Brabant, kept on indoors, the same kind of cap that reappears around the table in the finished picture.