One of seven heads dated 1885

The record dates Head of a Peasant Woman with Greenish Lace Cap to 1885, in the Nuenen years. It is one of seven painted heads with that date in this catalogue, a run in which the titles themselves record the variable being tested: a green shawl, a dark cap, a brownish cap, a greenish lace cap, a pipe. The sitters change and so does the headgear; the format does not.

What the record gives

The canvas is 37.5 x 28 cm — small, upright, roughly life-size for a head — and it is held by the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo. The measured palette returns brown as the dominant family — the commonest single result for 1885, in which brown and ochre together dominate 57% of the works — and it is not contradicted by the green named in the title: the title records a cap, the measurement records the surface as a whole.

Where the run leads

One of the seven heads from 1885 is recorded in this catalogue as a study for The Potato Eaters, itself dated 1885. Whether this particular canvas belongs to that campaign is not something the record states, and it is not asserted here. What the record does show is a painter making the same picture repeatedly in one year, in one village, immediately before leaving for Paris.