Portrait of an Old Woman

Van Gogh's portraits of older working-class women from his Nuenen and Hague periods represent a sustained ethical and aesthetic position: that faces marked by age, labour, and poverty deserved the same serious artistic attention as conventionally beautiful subjects. This 1885 portrait of an unnamed elderly woman at the Van Gogh Museum belongs to the same tradition of dignified social realism that he found in Rembrandt's old women, Hals's almshouse sitters, and Courbet's unflattered rural figures. He described these heads to Theo as character studies — investigations of how a life's experience was recorded in a face — and made them in numbers that would have been incomprehensible to a painter working primarily for the market. The Dutch tradition of serious portraiture across social classes gave him permission for this kind of subject; his own moral conviction gave him the determination to pursue it with sustained intensity through dozens of individual studies.

Dark earth tones — umber, ochre, grey — dominate the restricted palette. The face is modelled with deliberate roughness, the brushwork seeking character rather than smoothness. The background is kept undifferentiated to direct full attention to the face.