Cabeça de camponesa

Through the winter of 1884 into 1885 van Gogh was living in Nuenen, a village in the largely Catholic south of the Netherlands where his father served as the Protestant pastor. He spent the cold months painting heads, roughly 40 of them, bringing one local farm worker after another in to sit under a lamp. He was not after handsome faces. He wanted them dark and weathered, the colour, he told his brother Theo, of a good dusty potato still in its skin. This is one of those studies, a woman in a pale cap, her skin ruddy, her eyes lit with small points of white. That spring he gathered figures like her around a lamp and a dish of potatoes for The Potato Eaters, which he finished in April 1885.