Category: Grief Journey

These paintings were not of sunflowers, or starry nights, but instead they were of a family–another kind of passionate aching joy. Vincent had moved to the yellow house in Arles to paint when he became friends with a local postman and his family, the Roulin family. He wanted to work on painting portraits and each member of the family sat for him.

Knowing how Vincent longed for love, he wrote “It’s so easy to love, the hard thing is to be loved,” these paintings seem so poignant, especially the multiple paintings of the mother, Augustine Roulin. In his paintings of her she always has a rope around her wrist because while sitting, she is using the rope to rock the cradle of her newborn child. Van Gogh called the painting “La Berceuse” which means both “lullaby” or “she who rocks the cradle.”

Vincent wrote to his brother about this painting, “I would like to see this painting “in the cabin of a boat” where fishermen “in their melancholy isolation, exposed to all the dangers, alone on the sad sea… would experience a feeling of being rocked, reminding them of their own lullabies.”