Head of a woman

This is a portrait of Gordina. She was one of the daughters of the De Groot family, who posed for The potato eaters. Gordina was Van Gogh’s favorite model in Nuenen. At least 20 studies of her are known to exist. This portrait is one of the few signed by Van Gogh. In Gordina, he almost certainly recognized the type of peasant woman he so admired in the work of his idol Jean-François Millet: those with ‘coarse, flat faces, low foreheads and thick lips, not sharp but full.’