Bildnis Madame Trabuc

Van Gogh painted this in September 1889 while he was a patient at the asylum of Saint-Paul in Saint-Remy, in the south of France, where he had committed himself after cutting his ear the winter before. The sitter is Jeanne Trabuc, in her mid-fifties, wife of the hospital's head orderly and one of the few people inside those walls he could talk to. He described her plainly in a letter to his brother Theo as a faded, resigned woman who had seen a great deal of trouble. He worked quickly, in muted greens and violets, and later made a second version to give to the couple themselves. Behind their little house stood the olive grove he was painting over and over that same autumn.