Cabeça de camponesa com xale verde

In the spring of 1885 Van Gogh was living in the Dutch village of Nuenen, in his father's parsonage, and painting the local farm workers one head at a time. He made about 40 of these studies that year, telling his brother Theo he wanted to learn to paint a head with real character rather than a polished likeness. This woman in her dark green shawl comes out of that stretch of work, the same models and earthy browns that fed straight into his first big picture, The Potato Eaters. He deliberately turned her off the straight-on pose he used for most of the series. There is no prettifying here. The face is built from quick, blunt strokes, the palette kept to the colour of the soil these people worked.