Portrait of Augustine Roulin

Van Gogh painted Augustine Roulin — the wife of his friend the postman Joseph Roulin — multiple times in late 1888, and his various versions of her portrait explore the same subject from different technical approaches. Augustine is shown seated against floral wallpaper or background, a flower rope in her lap, the image of maternal steadiness and warmth. Van Gogh associated her with the image of a lullaby, and several of these paintings are titled 'La Berceuse' (The Lullaby). This version in the Collection Am Römerholz in Switzerland is one of several, each showing Van Gogh testing different coloristic relationships within the same compositional formula.

Augustine is seated frontally against a background of large floral decoration, the figure and ground creating a pattern-against-pattern composition unusual in Van Gogh's portraiture. His Arles palette deploys warm greens and reds in the background against the figure's warmer tones. The painting's decorative intensity is deliberate, the portrait becoming almost an icon.