梵高习作油画《女人头像》

　　Did Van Gogh care if his models were good-looking or not? He chose this woman for her appearance, but not for the reason you might expect.

　　梵高在乎他的模特好看不好看吗?他选择这个女人是因为她的外表，而不是你可能会想到的原因。

　　He was looking specifically for country people, both men and women, who had ‘coarse, flat faces with low foreheads and thick lips’. He wanted to paint 50 of them as what he called ‘study heads’. Their facial features were intended to show that they lived in close communion with nature and the land they farmed. Van Gogh’s interest in physiognomy may seem odd to us now, but in his own time it was not unusual.

　　他特别寻找那些“粗糙、扁平的脸、低额头、厚嘴唇”的乡下人，无论男女。他想把其中的50个画成他所谓的“学习头像”。他们的面部特征旨在表明他们生活在与自然和他们耕种的土地的密切交流之中。梵高对面相学的兴趣现在对我们来说似乎很奇怪，但在他那个时代并不罕见。