Kop van een vrouw met witte muts (Head of a Woman with White Cap)

In early 1883, Vincent van Gogh arrived in Nuenen, a small village in the Netherlands where his parents were living. Initially, he planned for only a brief stay but quickly found himself inspired by the lives and faces of the region’s Brabant inhabitants. Writing to his brother Theo, Van Gogh explained, ‘I see an inexhaustible resource for subjects from peasant life and the question is just – to seize it – to work’ (Letter 493, 13 April 1885, in L. Jansen, H. Luijten & N. Bakker, eds., Vincent van Gogh: The Letters, vol. 3, Drenthe - Paris: 1883-1887, London, 2009, p. 224-225). Ultimately, Van Gogh would remain in Nuenen for two years, spending much of the winter of 1884-1885 painting the women and men of the village.
Van Gogh was encouraged to devote himself to this extensive cycle of work following a visit by his friend, the painter, Anthon van Rappard, in October 1884. While in Nuenen, Rappard painted several studies of heads, which greatly impressed Van Gogh, so much so that he decided to embark upon his own series, with the aim of improving his skills as a figure painter in advance of moving to Antwerp. ‘To make progress, because I’m just getting into my stride, I have to paint 50 heads,’ he declared. ‘As soon as possible and one after the other’ (Letter 468, 2 November 1884, in ibid., p. 210). He proceeded to spend the days painting and the nights sketching as he worked towards this goal.
As a result, the period between Van Gogh’s arrival in Nuenen and his departure for Antwerp in 1885 would prove to be among the most prolific of his career, and his output would come to constitute almost a quarter of his entire oeuvre. Despite such extensive attention, he rarely identified his sitters, viewing his subjects not as individuals but rather representatives of the rural conditions he encountered in the region. Even as the artist endeavoured to immerse himself in the Brabant community, he sought out particular types, preferring, for example, models with ‘coarse, flat faces with low foreheads and thick lips, not that sharp look, but full and Millet-like,’ the latter a reference to the Barbizon painter Jean-François Millet whose work Van Gogh greatly admired (Letter 451, 2 July 1884, in ibid., p. 160).
Van Gogh painted Kop van een vrouw met witte muts (Head of a Woman with White Cap) in the winter of 1885. The painting was previously in the collection of the Swiss artist Cuno Amiet. Here, Van Gogh posed his model frontally, drawing attention to her wide-set eyes and full mouth, and applied his paint in thick, impastoed brushstrokes. Per local custom, she wears a simple white bonnet, which stands out against the shadowy background. Van Gogh was particularly captivated by the interplay between light and dark in these paintings, and these traditional headdresses provided him the opportunity to render a dramatic contrast with the dark tonalities of his sitter’s costume. ‘The heads of these women here with the white caps – it’s difficult – but it’s so eternally beautiful,’ he wrote. ‘It’s precisely the chiaroscuro – the white and the part of the face in shadow, that has such a fine tone’ (Letter 478, early January 1885, in ibid., p. 200).
Kop van een vrouw met witte muts is an arresting, penetrating image in part due to its restrained palette. Form, Van Gogh felt, could be more strongly expressed precisely because of the monochromatic colour scheme. Accordingly, his sitter feels entirely human – she has a soul – and out of the darkness, Van Gogh has conjured a powerful presence and a profound sense of pathos.