Portrait d'Augustine Roulin

Augustine Roulin was the wife of Joseph Roulin, the postal official in Arles who became one of Van Gogh's few close friends in the town and sat for him repeatedly. Van Gogh painted her here toward the end of 1888, the same weeks in which he was sharing the yellow house with Gauguin and edging toward the crisis that would end that December with his cut ear. He loved painting the whole Roulin family, the father, the mother, the baby and the older boys, as a kind of substitute household. Soon after this he began the series he called La Berceuse, showing Augustine holding the cord of a cradle, meant to comfort like a lullaby. This quieter portrait came just before that.