Augustine Roulin is holding a cord. It runs off the bottom edge to a cradle that is not in the picture. Van Gogh painted her like this five times between December 1888 and January 1889, and what he wanted for the result was a wall in the cabin of a fishing boat.
Who she was
Her husband Joseph Roulin sorted the post at Arles station and stayed Van Gogh's friend through everything that happened that winter. The whole family sat for him: Joseph in his blue uniform with the gold lettering, the sons Armand and Camille, and the baby.
Augustine had gone back to Lambesc, her home village eighty kilometres from Arles, to give birth to Marcelle in the summer of 1888. The title means the woman who rocks the cradle, and the cord is the mechanism — you pull it, the cradle rocks, and her hands never have to move. The background behind her is not wallpaper, either. It is dahlias, flattened and simplified, a motif he used hard for a few months and then dropped for good.
A picture for a fishing boat
On 21 January 1889 he wrote to Gauguin about it. If you put this canvas just as it is in a boat, he said, even one belonging to Icelandic fishermen, there would be some who would feel the lullaby in it. He was a month out from the night of 23 December and the ear, and the letter is full of what he thought painting was for: to do what the music of Berlioz and Wagner had done, a consoling art for distressed hearts.
The image of a picture in a cabin was not his own invention. Pierre Loti's novel about the Iceland fishery, published in 1886, describes the little painted Virgin the men keep on a shelf in the saloon, and the editors of his letters point straight at it. He was not painting a portrait so much as making something to hang where there is nothing else to look at.
Between two sunflowers
He knew exactly how he wanted it shown, too. In a letter the following May he sets out the arrangement: this canvas in the middle with a painting of sunflowers on either side, like candelabra, the yellows feeding each other. The same letter notes that the yellows and oranges in her face gain in brilliance when they sit near the yellow of the shutters, which is the kind of thing only somebody who has tried it in a room would write. He never saw it hung that way.
Five versions exist, all made over the turn of that year, and four of them are in museums — Otterlo, New York, Chicago, Boston. The cradle is in none of them. Neither is the baby, and neither is the sound, which leaves a woman in a green dress holding a piece of string and looking at nothing in particular.
The cradle is out of the frame. What is left is a woman rocking something you cannot see, with the rest of it written on the back.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.