Van Gogh’s Head of a Woman (Gordina de Groot) (March-April 1885)
Het Noordbrabants Museum, s’Hertogenbosch. Photograph Peter Cox
Adventures with Van Gogh is a weekly blog by Martin Bailey, our long-standing correspondent and expert on the artist. Published every Friday, his stories range from newsy items about this most intriguing artist to scholarly pieces based on his own meticulous investigations and discoveries. © Martin Bailey
The Noordbrabants Museum in the Netherlands has acquired Head of a Woman (Gordina de Groot) for €8.6m, making it among the most expensive Van Goghs ever bought by a museum.
Although the seller is anonymous, we can identify him as the London dealer and collector Daniel Katz. A UK owner may come as a surprise, since few Van Gogh paintings have been bought by British collectors in recent decades.
Katz, who is renowned for his eclectic artistic tastes and connoisseurship, told us: “I’m a bit sad to see Gordina go, but it is to the right home.”
In February 2023 the Van Gogh came up for sale at Christie’s, with an estimate of £1m-£2m. This seemed low, because it is among the finest peasant “heads” which the artist painted when he was living with his parents in the southern Dutch village of Nuenen. The place lies 40 kilometres south of s’Hertogenbosch, where the Noordbrabants Museum is located.
In the end the painting sold at Christie’s for £4,842,000. The Noordbrabants Museum had been bidding, but had to drop out, and the underbidder was Chinese.
Katz has now confirmed to us that he ended up being the buyer of the painting. Although a dealer, he says he had bought the Van Gogh for his private collection and his personal enjoyment. “I took it home and lived with it,” he says.
A few months after the sale Katz was offered and acquired the original frame which had been put on the painting in 1903—the picture had been reframed by Christie’s for the auction.
Last summer Katz was approached by Jacqueline Grandjean, the Noordbrabants director, and its curator Helewise Berger. They asked if he would sell the painting, and when he said no, they requested a loan. This was agreed and it went on display in January.
Van Gogh’s Head of a Woman (Gordina de Groot) at the Noordbrabants Museum, s’Hertogenbosch
Het Noordbrabants Museum, s’Hertogenbosch
Further pleading by the Noordbrabants led Katz, encouraged by his wife, to agree to a sale. A price of €8.6m was agreed. Katz had incurred some costs with the acquisition, but this still left him with a profit of nearly £2m.
The museum then launched a fundraising campaign to pay for the picture it dubbed “the Mona Lisa of Brabant”. Among the major backers were the Museaal Aankoopfonds (central governmental purchase fund), Mondriaan Fonds, and Vereniging Rembrandt. Three thousand private individuals also donated.
Van Gogh depicted Gordina in at least six other paintings. She is also the only individual in his series of “peasant heads” who has been identified. Gordina is among the five people around the kitchen table in the artist’s first masterpiece, The Potato Eaters (April-May 1885). All this makes the Noordbrabants acquisition particularly important.
While Van Gogh was living in Nuenen there was gossip that Gordina was pregnant with his child. Although she did soon afterwards have a baby boy, the artist denied he was the father, and it was probably a scurrilous rumour.
The Noordbrabants Museum now has ambitious plans to expand its presentation of Van Gogh’s work. It already has four paintings which have been bought since 2016 (and one in 1984) and six more are on loan. In presenting the plan, Grandjean said that “Van Gogh’s Gordina is home for eternity!”.
Next year there will be an exhibition around The Potato Eaters (26 July-23 November 2025), hopefully with one of the two versions of this peasant meal (the finished picture is at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum and the oil study is at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo).
Plans are also being made to create a new Van Gogh Wing at the museum, which should open in 2026.
Van Gogh's Head of a Woman with White Cap (January-February 1885)
© Christies
Last week Christie’s sold another Nuenen work, Head of a Woman with White Cap (January-February 1885). It fetched £1,855,000. The lower price reflects the fact that it lacks the quality and condition of the Noordbrabants painting.
Other Van Gogh news:
• Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum last week opened its exhibition Vive l’impressionnisme! Masterpieces from Dutch Collections (until 26 January 2025). The show includes two Van Goghs from the museum’s collection and touches on the role of Vincent’s brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris, in promoting Impressionism. In 1885 he sent five paintings by Monet and Sisley to the Netherlands for sale, but they were returned unsold. The Van Gogh Museum’s exhibition includes an atmospheric Camille Pissarro fan-shaped painting, Landscape with a Rainbow (1889), which the artist gave to Theo’s wife Jo Bonger as a New Year’s gift in December 1889.
Camille Pissarro’s Landscape with a Rainbow (1889)
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
Van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles (September 1889)
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Martin Bailey is a leading Van Gogh specialist and special correspondent for The Art Newspaper. Bailey has curated Van Gogh exhibitions at the Barbican Art Gallery, Compton Verney/National Gallery of Scotland and Tate Britain.
Martin Bailey’s recent Van Gogh books
Bailey has written a number of bestselling books on Van Gogh’s years in France: The Sunflowers Are Mine: The Story of Van Gogh's Masterpiece (Frances Lincoln 2013 (UK and US), Studio of the South: Van Gogh in Provence (Frances Lincoln 2016 (UK and US), Starry Night: Van Gogh at the Asylum (White Lion Publishing 2018, UK and US) and Van Gogh’s Finale: Auvers and the Artist’s Rise to Fame (Frances Lincoln 2021, UK and US). The Sunflowers are Mine (UK and US) and Van Gogh’s Finale (UK and US) are also now available in a more compact paperback format. Living with Vincent van Gogh: the Homes and Landscapes that shaped the Artist (White Lion Publishing 2019, UK and US) provides an overview of the artist’s life. The Illustrated Provence Letters of Van Gogh has been reissued (Batsford 2021, UK and US). My Friend Van Gogh/Emile Bernard provides the first English translation of Bernard’s writings on Van Gogh (David Zwirner Books 2023, UK and US).
To contact Martin Bailey, please email [email protected]. Please note that he does not undertake authentications.
Read more from Martin's Adventures with Van Gogh blog here.