Description
NARRATOR: Augustine Roulin posed many times for Van Gogh. Here, the artist cast her as the emblematic mother. The rope she holds would have been attached to a cradle. A steady pull on the rope kept the cradle rocking. The title, “La Berceuse,” refers to her role as a mother rocking a cradle, and to a lullaby.
Van Gogh manipulated his paints carefully, in order to create a particular effect. Jim Wright, head of Paintings Conservation here at the Museum of Fine Arts, explains.
JIM WRIGHT: Van Gogh wanted a variety of textures and surfaces. For instance, the red of the background floor in La Berceuse is a mixture of wax and linseed oil, and it becomes a very textured and very matte surface. While some of the colors, for instance, the turquoise-like color in the background is a pure oil paint, and that has a much different gloss than the red background. The blue circles around in the background around the red or orangish dots is also an oil pint, but it’s leached probably with very very little oil In it, so those areas are quite matte by comparison.
Van Gogh envisioned La Berceuse to hang between two Sunflowers, and one of the technical aspects that seems to indicate that he was thinking of this as he was painting La Berceuse is that her face is painted in very much the same manner as he painted many of the sunflowers, with the small yellow brushstrokes radiating out of the center of her face, the same with her hair, small brushstrokes look like petals on the sunflowers.
Details
- Work Date:
- 1889
- Location:
- Sidney and Esther Rabb Gallery (Gallery 255)
- Dimensions:
- 92.7 x 72.7 cm. (36 1/2 x 28 5/8 in.)
- Medium:
- Oil on canvas
- Credit Line:
- Bequest of John T. Spaulding