Van Gogh’s Head of a Woman expected to fetch up to £2 million at auction

A Vincent van Gogh oil portrait of Gordina de Groot will go up for auction at Christie’s auction house in London on Tuesday. The 1885 painting titled Kop van een vrouw, or Head of a Woman, was expected to be sold for 1 million to 2 million pounds, or between 1.1 and 2.3 million euros.

The painting was produced while Van Gogh resided in Nuenen after his parents relocated to the Noord-Brabant town. The woman in the painting can also be seen in another key Van Gogh work from that period, The Potato Eaters.

“I see an inexhaustible resource for subjects from peasant life and the question is just – to seize it – to work,” Van Gogh wrote in a letter to his brother after he moved to Nuenen. He used the period to produce studies of peasants’ heads. “They remind one of the earth, sometimes appear to have been modelled out of it.”

Christie’s noted that Gordina de Groot wears a white bonnet in the painting, as was the custom, and the shadows created by that intrigued the artist. “The heads of these women here with the white caps – it’s difficult – but it’s so eternally beautiful,” Van Gogh wrote.

“The intimate nature of the painting reverberated beyond the canvas and rumours swept Nuenen that van Gogh was the father of de Groot’s child. While he vehemently denied these claims, the present work nevertheless suggests a particular tenderness between artist and sitter, evident in the potency of her stare,” Christie’s wrote in an essay about the piece.

The 41x33 centimeter painting was first owned by Van Gogh’s family, and then changed hands five times before it was bequeathed to Anna-Marie Veuve-Pierson in The Hague. She later relocated to Zurich, and the painting has remained in Switzerland since. It was last exhibited at Kunsthaus Zurich in 1943.

The painting is being sold as part of Christie’s 20th / 21st Century: London Evening Sale.