A Canção de Ninar (Madame Roulin embalando o berço)

Van Gogh made this in Arles in the winter of 1888 to 1889, in the same weeks he broke with Gauguin and cut off part of his own ear. The sitter is Augustine Roulin, wife of the postman Joseph Roulin, one of the few families who stayed kind to him there. The rope in her hands runs to a cradle we cannot see. The title, La Berceuse, means the woman who rocks it. He was not after a likeness. He wanted a figure of comfort, a kind of everyday Madonna, and he imagined it hung between two of his sunflower canvases, like a shrine a sailor might look at in a ship's cabin. He painted five versions of her. This is the one Augustine chose to keep for herself.