Голова крестьянки

In the winter of 1884 and 1885 Van Gogh was living with his parents in the Dutch village of Nuenen, and he set himself a stubborn task: to paint the local farm workers from life, head after head, until he could handle them. He made around 40 of these dark studies, all working clothes and weathered faces set against shadow, admiring how Millet had given peasants their dignity. Most of the sitters stayed anonymous. One, a farmer's daughter named Gordina de Groot, he painted again and again, and she turns up among the figures around the lamp in The Potato Eaters, the large canvas all this practice was heading towards. He finished that picture in the spring of 1885 and thought it the best thing he had yet done.