Contadina seduta (mezza figura)

Through the winter of 1884 and into 1885 Van Gogh was living in Nuenen, a village in the Catholic south of the Netherlands where his father served as the Protestant minister, and he painted the local cottagers again and again. Something like 40 heads and half-figures came out of those months, in the browns and dull greens he was mixing then, and he was doing it as deliberate preparation. In April 1885 the studies turned into The Potato Eaters. This one is from February. Later that year the village priest told his parishioners to stop sitting for the painter, after one of his models, Gordina de Groot, turned out to be pregnant, and by November Van Gogh had left for Antwerp.