Today we’re going to be talking about an exhibition that I felt very fortunate to see, a Van Gogh exhibition at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts [MFA, Boston]. It has 23 works by Van Gogh along with paintings by Dutch painters for example like Frans Hals, Rembrandt who he admired greatly and there are actually 14 portraits of the Roulin family that he painted of them individually.
The Roulin family portraits is probably would be best known for the portraits of a fellow named Joseph Roulin. He was a postman in Arles where Van Gogh lived for a time. It’s probably one of the most iconic portraits of the late 19th century. This show gives you a far richer portrait of Van Gogh than the the kind of stereotypical idea people have of him. The artist who sold one painting in his lifetime, always depressed, cut off part of his ear, all of that sort of famous sort of caricature-ish stuff.
One of the smart things that the curators do with this exhibition is use that guiding concept of bringing art history to life. The idea that, you know, why did he make the paintings that he did? Why was he inspired to paint these people? And this is an idea that I kind of feel is important to teaching art history as well. So, making it accessible. You know, when you go into a classroom, you ask people, the first day of an art history class: “Well, let’s not worry about titles of paintings. Let’s not worry about dates necessarily right away. Let’s think about why did somebody get excited to make this work that we’re going to look at? What ideas excited them?”
I think this exhibition humanizes him because it really shows that he had a great friendship with this one family that he struck up when he moved to Arles in 1888. The show itself I think is really a chronicle of that kind of friendship which you see through these many paintings of his family. His wife Augustine, his two sons. Also, they had an infant baby during this time, Marcel, which you see in several portraits. And of course Joseph himself in his uniform, his postal uniform looking rather regal.
One of the touching things about the show is that Arles was really tough with Van Gogh. He moved there in 1888. He was starting to try to make friends, but a lot of people thought he was very eccentric. So they kind of shunned him. But the Roulin family, starting with Joseph, really befriended him. And so that’s how he went from painting just Joseph to then painting each of the individual members of the family. While he was, you know, trying to figure out what else he would paint in Arles, which included landscapes, he really fastened on this idea that he wanted to do portraits, and they were the ideal subject.
Van Gogh moved to Arles because he really wanted to get away from Paris. He was inspired in Paris. His palette brightened because he saw a lot of the other impressionists and post-impressionist painters, but it was really too frenetic for him, in his personality. So he moved to Arles with the idea of setting up a more peaceful place to work.
He found after a few months there a house he could move into, he called it The Yellow House, painted yellow on the outside, of course. And he called it “The Studio of the South” as well. He invited Gauguin to come down there and live with him because he had this vision that he could set up an artist colony. And the first move toward that was inviting Gauguin, who was actually a more established painter than Van Gogh at the time.
Even if he really had a precarious situation mentally, you know, he, he was not always well, bouts of depression, but it was a good period in terms of producing his work. He produced over 300 paintings and drawings within a little more than a year, which is really a remarkable number of works.
His relationship with Gauguin was always contentious. Gauguin told him that he didn’t always need to paint from the model or paint outside. Van Gogh insisted that he did. So they were always debating about how you should approach painting. Painting from memory, Gauguin felt that you could transform paintings more imaginatively. And Van Gogh didn’t have any, didn’t feel that was at all valid for his method of painting, which was much more expressive and less symbolic.
I think the contentiousness of that friendship contrasted with his friendship with the Roulins. They befriended him kind of unconditionally and that led to him painting all the members of the family: the two sons, the baby Marcelle, his wife, Joseph’s wife, Augustine.
There is a painting by Gauguin of Augustine Roulin. So you can contrast that stylistically with Van Gogh’s paintings, which I think shows you why their relationship was contentious because they had very different approaches to painting. Gauguin, much more symbolist, symbolic in his art.
Working directly from the sitter really was Van Gogh’s way of creating portraits which we feel like really connect us with the person in the painting, very strongly. Now this was tied into, of course, his gifts as an artist, but it was also tied into the idea that he had great knowledge of earlier Dutch portraiture which inspired him.
For example, in painting the two sons of the Roulin family, he looked back to a painting by Frans Hals, The Fisher Boy, a Dutch old master painting that really inspired him to make the people in the painting seem very immediate and fresh in front of you. Two other painters that really inspired Van Gogh and his connection to earlier Dutch art our Rembrandt and Carel Fabritius.
There are some very good Rembrandt paintings in the show. One painting, a self-portrait by Carel Fabritius. Interesting to note that one of his other paintings, Fabritius that is, is The Goldfinch, which was made famous, most famous probably by Donna Tartt’s novel. In trying to set up this artist colony, that never really worked out. Gauguin and Van Gogh really developed a contentious relationship to the point where they had a big blowout. Gauguin said he was leaving. Told him that he was not going to stick around any longer. And so Van Gogh had kind of a breakdown. And that’s when that famous incident of him cutting off part of his ear happened because he was so distressed at the failure of their ability to set up this colony.
Unfortunately, after Gauguin left Arles, Van Gogh fell into quite a deep depression. He was pretty much immobilized.
It turned out that Joseph, Joseph Roulin was his lifeline in a sense. He came to see him all the time. He tried to cheer him up. Eventually he helped him get out of the hospital and back to daily life. And all this time he was sending updates to Theo to let him know how Vincent was doing. One of the things that the exhibition does so nicely is it has correspondence in the show. They continued to correspond, actually, Vincent and Joseph, after they both left Arles in 1889.
And in the letters, the correspondence between Vincent and Joseph, he let Joseph know that Theo really liked the portraits. He was quite charmed by them. And this really delighted Joseph. I think he felt like that this, in a way, was a great acceptance of the two of them.
It’s on view in Boston until September and then it’s going to move on to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and be up there until part way through January [2026]. You can go on the museum’s website and you can find several images from the show. They have some nice short videos on Van Gogh and the Postman both. You also can listen to the complete audio tour of the exhibition on your own. And if you want to delve a little further into some of the stories I’ve been commenting on, you can look at the fully illustrated catalog.
Thanks so much for watching! This is Art with Bob Pincus. If you have liked this episode, please subscribe, give us a thumbs up. Stay tuned for future episodes about art history, art, and the art community.
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This video was produced and edited by
Matthew Manly Pincus / MP Storytelling
Robert L. Pincus 
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