Madame Roulin

In the autumn of 1888 Gauguin came south to Arles to live and work with Van Gogh in the little yellow house Vincent had rented. The two months they spent together were intense and, by the end, disastrous, closing with the famous night Van Gogh cut his own ear. While it lasted, both men painted the same neighbours. This is Augustine Roulin, wife of Joseph the postman, whom Van Gogh painted many times over. Gauguin gives her heavy dark outlines and flat blocks of colour, his own manner rather than Vincent's. On the wall behind her he has sketched in one of his own landscapes, the one he called Blue Trees, so the portrait quietly carries a second picture inside it.