Vincent van Gogh

Col. C. Mouwen Jr., Breda, The Netherlands

Galerie d’Art Oldenzeel, Rotterdam

H. van Ogtrop-van Kempen, Aalst, The Netherlands (acquired by 1929)

Mrs. H. van Ogtrop-van Kempen, Aalst, The Netherlands (by descent from the above)

E.J. van Wisselingh, Amsterdam

Private Collection, Spain (and sold: Sotheby's, London, June 30, 1981, lot 27a)

Piccadilly Gallery, London (acquired at the above sale)

Landau Fine Art, Montreal

Acquired from the above in 1998

Rotterdam, Galerie d’Art, Oldenzeel, Vincent van Gogh, 1903

Jacob Baart de la Faille, L'Oeuvre de Vincent van Gogh, vol. II, pt. I, Paris, 1928, no. 74, illustrated p. XXII

Walther Vanbeselaere, De Hollandsche periode in het werk van Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam & Antwerp, 1937, no. 146, listed pp. 290 & 415

Jacob Baart de la Faille, Vincent van Gogh, Paris, 1939, no. 145, illustrated p. 126

The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh, vol. II, London, 1958, letter nos. 390, 394, & 395

Jacob Baart de la Faille, The Works of Vincent van Gogh, London, 1970, no. 146, illustrated p. 91

Paolo Lecaldano, Tout l'oeuvre peint de Van Gogh, Paris, 1971, no. 127

Paolo Lecaldano, L'Opera pittorica completa di van Gogh e i suoi nessi grafici, Milan, 1977, no. 127, illustrated p. 101

Jan Hulsker, The Complete Van Gogh, Oxford, 1980, no. 551, illustrated p. 127

Ingo F. Walther & Rainer Metzger, Vincent Van Gogh: The Complete Paintings, vol. I, Cologne, 1990, illustrated in color p. 69

Good condition in general. Under UV light there are as scattered retouches throughout as well as a vertical line running through the center of the canvas which may been the result of a fold. Otherwise the pigment is stable.
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Tête de paysanne à la coiffe blanche is a powerful example of Van Gogh’s early portraiture, an aspect of his oeuvre which is undoubtedly among his most celebrated. As the artist said himself in 1890: “That which excites me the most, much, much more than the others in my work—is the portrait, the modern portrait… I would like to make portraits that, a century later, might appear to people of the time like apparitions. Accordingly, I don’t try to do that by the way of photographic resemblance, but by way of our impassioned expressions” (quoted in Van Gogh Face to Face, The Portraits (exhibition catalogue), The Detroit Institute of Arts, 2000, p. 229).

The present work was painted in 1884, when the artist was living with his parents in Nuenen. He had intended to be there only briefly but wound up staying for almost two years, a period that proved to be seminal in his artistic development and the output of which culminated in his great masterpiece The Potato Eaters of 1885 (see fig. 1). His intense portraits of local people, often imbued with an exaggerated sense of isolation, reflect Van Gogh’s own personal sense of solitude during this time. His letters reveal his anguished mental state and many of his portraits reflect this loneliness: the heavy, sad eyes of this sitter—which is undoubtedly one of the most psychologically affecting portraits of this series—reflects the melancholy of individual human struggle.  The thick application of paint in broad, deliberate strokes perfectly expresses the hardship of this woman’s daily life. These works were a projection of the artist's own internal struggles, a way for him to express his nervous introversion and solitude.

Van Gogh wanted to paint peasants as if he were an insider. In a letter to his brother Theo, the famed Paris-based art dealer, he remarked that ''peasants painted by city dwellers inevitably reminded one of the Paris suburbs,” and said that he preferred to live among peasants and share their sober lives (letter 400). Throughout the winter of 1884-85 the artist became obsessed by the character-ridden expressions of local peasants, and between December and January he drew and painted no fewer than sixty heads. The artist had found it difficult in his very early career to find models, however in Nuenen he was able to find many locals who were happy to pose for him regularly. They were mostly members of the de Groot family, also the sitters for The Potato Eaters. Their daughter Sien de Groot, also known as Gordina, posed at least twenty times for the artist.

Rendered in a limited tertiary palette which evoked the lives led by the peasants of Brabant, the sitter in the present work is depicted insistently close to the picture plane, with little background to distract from the many stories displayed in her dramatically lit face. Writing to Theo on March 2nd, 1885, Vincent wrote:  “At present I'm painting not just as long as there's light, but even in the evening by lamplight in the cottages, if I can somehow make things out on my palette, in order to capture if possible something of the singular effects of lighting at night” (letter 484). This lamp-lit focus is further heightened by the aesthetic effect of her traditional headdress. Van Gogh saw in this elaborate white head piece (known as a net cap) the opportunity to emphasize the contrast between the dark, undetermined backgrounds and the dramatic features of the her face. As Evert van Uitert noted: “Van Gogh was trying to capture the distinctive characteristic of his peasant figures, and considered it more important for a head to be expressive than to be absolutely correct” (Evert van Uitert, Vincent van Gogh, The Letters, London, 2009, vol. III, p. 144).

In the present work, the illuminated planes of the sitter's face smolder in the foreground against a muted background of nocturnal darkness, and the deep pools of her eyes stare out pieringly toward the viewer. The result is an unflinchingly intimate and expressive portrait of an ordinary woman alone with her existence. Tête de paysanne à la coiffe blanche is van Gogh at his most psychologically poignant and authentic, and its physical and expressive brushwork is evidence, even at this early point in his career, of his daring manipulation and mastery of oil paint.

Van Gogh’s Dutch roots had an immeasurable impact on his art. Since his arrival in The Hague in 1881, his technique was largely shaped by the styles of the myriad artists and schools that flourished in the region at the time, in particular the Hague School to which he was introduced by Anton Mauve, his cousin by marriage. He gradually developed a unique and evocative take on realism, further influenced by the French Barbizon school, English and Continental wood engravers and, most importantly, certain Dutch old masters. As George S. Keyes elaborates: “For Van Gogh these sources of inspiration intermingled and merged as he drew upon them to shape his own art. He could focus on each for its perceived modernity and topicality, yet also recognize how these sources could equally and simultaneously relate to the past. For him the Dutch old masters seemed truly modern, and Vincent conflated them and their supposed naturalism with that of the Barbizon and Hague Schools and with his own endeavors as an artist. The Dutch old masters represented something else of extraordinary significance to van Gogh—a sense of the continuity of Dutch culture and a harking back to a truer, simpler world of shared values as opposed to the fragmented reality of modern, industrialized society. This was a utopian construct superimposed by van Gogh on the tradition as he perceived it. The tradition as he chose to understand it focused on several themes: the edifying portrait; the peasant wedded to the agrarian tradition of the land as a mainstay of the social order; representations of landscape showing mankind in harmony with nature; and a perceived naturalism that expressed the truth. These points buttressed van Gogh’s assumption that there is a continuum between past and present and enabled him to embrace traditional subject matters as a valid concern for modern art” (George S. Keyes, Van Gogh Face to Face, The Portraits (exhibition catalogue), Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit, 2000, p. 26).