Madame Augustine Roulin with Baby

Van Gogh had been in Arles about six months when he met the local postman Joseph Roulin, a warm, talkative republican who became one of his few real friends there. He set about painting the whole family, convinced that portraits were where modern art was heading. This is Augustine Roulin with her daughter Marcelle, born that July of 1888 and only a few months old when she posed, held up almost like an offering, her round face the brightest thing on the canvas. He made a second version too, now in Philadelphia. The sittings ran through the same autumn that Gauguin came to share his yellow house, weeks before the December night Van Gogh cut his ear.