Head of a Peasant Woman with Green Shawl

Head of a Peasant Woman with Green Shawl (1885) at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon belongs to the Nuenen head series, adding the chromatic note of a green shawl to the dark palette that dominated most of his peasant portraits. Van Gogh was sensitive to the slight variations in colour that the peasant women's dress allowed within the narrow range of affordable working clothing: the green shawl was a modest accent, but within the restricted palette of his Dutch period it served as a significant compositional element. He wrote to Theo about observing how small accents of unexpected colour — a red hair band, a white cap, a green shawl — could lift an otherwise tonally sombre composition without falsifying its character. The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, one of France's oldest provincial art museums, holds this as part of a broad European collection that includes significant nineteenth-century French and international works.

Dark, blunt brushwork dominates the painting, with the green shawl providing the only distinct color accent against a brown and ochre ground. The face is modeled with direct, unrefined strokes, and the painting's rough, physical surface has the quality of a rapid but committed observation rather than a polished portrait.