section_path: Style and works/Major series/Portraits
section_name: Portraits
paragraph_text: Portraits
  
  Van Gogh said portraiture was his greatest interest. "What I'm most passionate about, much much more than all the rest in my profession", he wrote in 1890, "is the portrait, the modern portrait." It is "the only thing in painting that moves me deeply and that gives me a sense of the infinite." He wrote to his sister that he wished to paint portraits that would endure, and that he would use colour to capture their emotions and character rather than aiming for photographic realism. Those closest to van Gogh are mostly absent from his portraits; he rarely painted Theo, van Rappard or Bernard. The portraits of his mother were from photographs.
  
  Van Gogh painted Arles' postmaster Joseph Roulin and his family repeatedly. In five versions of La Berceuse (The Lullaby), van Gogh painted Augustine Roulin quietly holding a rope that rocks the unseen cradle of her infant daughter. Van Gogh had planned for it to be the central image of a triptych, flanked by paintings of sunflowers.