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Date : 1889
Sizes : 74 cm x 93 cm
Material : Oil on canvas
Acquisition : Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection (1926)
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French Painting
Painting
Area related
Arles (France)
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| Description |  |
In December 1888, Vincent van Gogh began a portrait of Madame Roulin, the wife of a "Socratic" local postman—the artist's own characterization—with whom he had become friends. Van Gogh completed the first of an eventual five versions of the portrait in January 1889, during his recuperation (the Art Institute's painting is the second in the series).
He told in one letter that he had named it La Berceuse, which means both "lullaby" and "woman rocking a cradle", and noted how wonderful it would be "to achieve in painting what the music of Berlioz and Wagner has already done." And he advised his brother Theo to place it between two of his sunflower paintings to form a kind of triptych, a "decoration" suitable "for the end wall of a ship's cabin."
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