Portrait de Madame Trabuc

This September 1889 portrait of Jeanne Trabuc, wife of the chief orderly at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, is paired with a portrait of her husband Charles Trabuc — together they form a double portrait of the couple who managed the day-to-day life of the asylum. Van Gogh's ability to form these relationships even during his most severe illness is testimony to his fundamental social warmth, which persisted despite his reputation for difficult behaviour. He wrote to Theo about Jeanne Trabuc with characteristic precision: describing her face as bearing the marks of illness (she had survived smallpox, which had left its traces) while possessing a real dignity and self-possession. The portrait also belongs to his broader Saint-Rémy figure project, in which patients, orderlies, and staff all became subjects — a democratic extension of the Nuenen peasant heads into an institutional environment. The Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg holds this canvas as part of its significant Van Gogh holdings, which were built up through early-twentieth-century Russian collecting.

The portrait is painted with the Saint-Rémy period's characteristic strong contour lines and bold, simplified colour masses. The sitter's black dress is set against a pale green-blue background, the dark form creating a strong silhouette. Her face is rendered with careful, observational strokes — more conventionally portraitistic than Van Gogh's most expressionist works from this period.