La Berceuse (Woman Rocking a Cradle; Augustine-Alix Pellicot Roulin, 1851–1930)

La Berceuse — 'The Lullaby' — was one of Van Gogh's most ambitious and personally significant paintings, of which he made five versions between December 1888 and March 1889. Augustine Roulin, wife of his postman friend Joseph Roulin in Arles, holds a rope attached to an unseen cradle; she is presented as an archetypal mother figure, a consoling image Van Gogh imagined hanging in sailors' cabins to comfort men at sea. The Metropolitan Museum version shows the sitter against a background of elaborate floral wallpaper that flattens the space in a Japanese-inspired way, creating an icon-like frontality very different from conventional portraiture.

The elaborate floral background — drawn from Japanese decorative sources — fills the picture plane with pattern, creating an almost Byzantine flatness around the figure. The sitter is painted with firm contours and simplified modeling. Van Gogh uses complementary contrasts of red, green, and yellow throughout the composition.