Contadina

Through the winter and spring of 1885 Van Gogh painted head after head of the country people around Nuenen, the Dutch village where his father was the pastor. He wanted, he told his brother Theo in his letters, to catch something true about people who worked the land, and he had no interest in making them pretty. The faces come out broad and weathered, cap and skin laid down in the same earthy browns, lit as if by one low lamp. These studies fed straight into the big group picture he made that spring, The Potato Eaters. He painted dozens of the heads, and believed this rough, dark work was the most honest thing he had done so far.