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Van Gogh painted this in Arles in the last weeks of 1888, when he had found in the local postman, Joseph Roulin, and his family the sitters he had long been wanting. This is Roulin's wife, Augustine, holding their daughter Marcelle, who had been born that July. He worked through the whole family that winter, the father, the mother, the baby, and the two boys, and gave each of them a scheme of strong colour. Here mother and child are built from greens and white over a yellow ground, tied together with blue outlines. The mother sits back with her face half in shadow while the baby's round face turns straight out at us. Within weeks of finishing pictures like this, his crisis with Gauguin would break.