When Vincent van Gogh set out to make the four portraits of the Roulin family that are the centerpiece of the present show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (as well as numerous other depictions of the family that are not included), he was already an expert landscapist, but was relatively untried in the art of portraiture. One of the reasons for this inexperience, he wrote his brother Theo, was that he had a hard time finding models to sit for him, especially since, given his indigence, he was unable to pay them anything. Thus he was delighted when, in 1888, a postman in Arles with whom he had become friends and drinking partners, Joseph Roulin, agreed to sit for him, along with his wife, his three children, and one of his infant grandchildren.
These portraits were painted in the two years before van Gogh took his own life, during what appears to have been one of the artist’s happier periods. In these works—which are displayed together with several of the artist’s landscapes and portraits by Rembrandt and Frans Hals, among other paintings—van Gogh is creating a wholly new kind of portraiture. It has some sympathetic consonance with the work of his friend Paul Gauguin and appears to owe something to the experiential expansion of colors and forms of that slightly older artist. But none of Gauguin’s portraits from this period goes quite as far as van Gogh’s, and the Gauguin portraits that do are later and appear to have been inspired by van Gogh’s example.
One could perhaps choose to interpret the flowers and vines that rise up around the postman in one work, and around his wife in another, as being actual vines at their backs, or even brightly colored wallpaper. But the overwhelming thrust of the decor suggests that those vegetable forms represent a willfully arbitrary presence that has been included not only for its visual dazzle, but also for the artifice of its effect. At the same time, these works unleash a spate of color as raw and unmediated as Western painting had ever seen up to that point. But there are still other virtues to these works: the beard of the postman is, in the several versions of the portrait that van Gogh created, a miracle of drawing, and each work taken as a whole communicates not only a kind of hieratic grandeur, but also a sense of the sitter’s strong and benign personality. It is easy to see why van Gogh was so drawn to him. Even the portraits of the postman’s three children, though less obviously daring, possess a directness that is new to art.
When van Gogh gave each of the sitters one of the numerous portraits that he painted of the family, his perennial modesty probably induced him to feel that they had done him a greater favor just by sitting there than he could ever repay. And yet, in the process of painting these portraits, he had bestowed on them—and himself—a measure of immortality greater than anything they ever could have imagined.
Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits • Museum of Fine Arts, Boston • March 30 to September 7 • mfa.org
