Contadina, a mezzo busto, seduta

Through the winter of 1884 and into 1885, van Gogh set out to paint the peasants around Nuenen exactly as they were, working through some 40 studies of local farm labourers. He wanted their coarse, weathered faces and heavy hands, the very plainness that genteel painters avoided, following his hero Jean-François Millet. These studies were his training for the big canvas he was building toward, The Potato Eaters, the dim supper scene he finished in 1885. Here a farm woman sits in her working clothes against a dark ground, caught not posing but simply resting. He wrote that year that the white caps of the Brabant women were hard to paint and yet so eternally beautiful.