Madame Augustine Roulin with Baby

Van Gogh produced five versions of Augustine Roulin nursing her infant daughter Marcelle between November 1888 and April 1889, and this Metropolitan Museum example belongs to the earliest group painted at Arles. The conceptual framework was among his most elaborately theorized: inspired by reading Pierre Loti's fishermen novel Pêcheur d'Islande, he imagined the image of a rocking mother as a consolatory picture for sailors far from home, to be hung between two Sunflower canvases as a secular triptych of warmth and comfort. He called Augustine 'La Berceuse' — the lullaby, the cradle-rocker — and returned to the composition obsessively even during his breakdown in December 1888 and early confinement at the asylum. The Roulin family — postman, wife, and three children — were the closest thing Van Gogh had to a social circle in Arles, and the series of portraits he made of them constituted his most sustained attempt at Dutch-style group portraiture translated into a working-class southern French key. Gauguin, living in the Yellow House at this same moment, found Van Gogh's colour choices excessive; their disagreements about the direction of painting were already intensifying toward the December crisis.

Vivid red dominating the sitter's figure is set against an intensely decorative green background with floral motifs, a colour clash Van Gogh deliberately engineered for emotional effect. His thick, confident impasto defines Augustine's broad form, while the background is filled with a dense, almost wallpaper-like pattern drawn from his study of Japanese decorative art.