The Mumps

Mumps moved through Paris households in the 1890s as a matter of course. No vaccine existed until the 1960s and nothing shortened the illness, so you sat it out at home with your jaw bound up, which is what this small picture records. The figure has her back turned, a cloth tied over her head and under the swollen cheek. The Van Gogh Museum takes her to be, most probably, the painter's sister Marie, who married his friend the painter Ker-Xavier Roussel the year after. The museum also notes that the patterns and the flat blocks of colour take over so completely that the subject is not obvious at first glance. It is oil on cardboard, roughly 24 by 20 centimetres, painted in the flat where his mother ran a dressmaking business.