Peasant Woman, Head
oil on canvas laid down on panel
153Ü4 x 111Ü2 in. (40 x 29.1 cm.)
Painted in Nuenen, December 1884-January 1885

Exhibited

Rotterdam, Kunstzalen Oldenzeel, Vincent van Gogh, November 1903, possibly no. 14.
Rotterdam, Kunstzalen Oldenzeel, Vincent van Gogh, November-December 1904, possibly no. 7.
Rotterdam, Museum Boymans, Kersttentoonstelling, December 1927-January 1928, no. 25.
Boston, Museum of Fine Arts and Philadelphia Museum of Art, Van Gogh: Face to Face, The Portraits, July 2000-January 2001.
Lot Notes

Peasant Woman, Head was painted in Nuenen, December 1884-January 1885. Van Gogh had returned to his home in Nuenen in December of 1883 with the intention of enrolling in the Academy at Antwerp the following year. He was eager to pursue a career as a figure painter at the Academy but the painter Anthon G.A. Ridder van Rappard suggested that he concentrate on painting heads to perfect his technique, so he decided to stay on another year. Writing to his brother Theo, he explained his aim, "But if I could paint about thirty studies of heads here first, I shall be able to get more out of Antwerp" (letter 383). Obviously taken with the subject, he increased the number to fifty in a later letter saying, "because right now I am hitting my stride" (letter 384). Van Gogh worked assiduously on these paintings through April of 1885.

The powerful studies of the human head were not intended to be probing psychological studies of selected individuals, but instead characterizations of certain types whom he thought of in terms of "the noble peasant." He used the peasants of Nuenen as models and in his letters he characterized them as "a lot of Ostade types among them: physiognomies reminding one of pigs or crows" (letter 330), and "rough, flat faces with low foreheads and thick lips, not sharp, but full and Millet-like" (letter 372). In a later letter he described his approach to painting the heads, "But that was much, much too light and was decidedly wrong, what was to be done? All the heads were finished, and even finished with great care, but I immediately repainted them, inexorably, and the color they are painted in now is like the color of a very dusty potato, unpeeled of course. While doing this I thought of how perfect that saying of Millet's peasants is: His peasants seem to be painted with the earth they work" (letter 405).

In Peasant Woman, Head the woman is shown in an unsentimental light, her face sunburned by her toil in the fields and her expression weary. She wears the coarse blue blouse and cap of the peasant. Striving for expressiveness in his painting the majority of these works were painted "wet-into-wet" (L. van Tilborgh and M. Vellekoop, Vincent Van Gogh Paintings, Dutch Period 1881-1885, London, 1999, p. 87). Because Van Gogh did not think of these heads as specific portraits, he did not record their identities. However, it is possible that the model of the present painting may be a member of the de Groot-van Rooij family. The culmination of the peasant head series was the large scale painting that he completed in April of 1885, The Potato-Eaters (Hulsker, no. 686; National Museum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam) that he had hoped to send to the Paris Salon.

Georgette P. van Stolk, the second owner of this painting, was the secretary of the Rotterdam Society ("Rotterdamsche Kunstkring"). In addition to the present work, she also owned three other works by Van Gogh including The Starry Night (Hulsker, no. 1731; Museum of Modern Art, New York).