{"id":291857,"date":"2025-11-18T04:47:13","date_gmt":"2025-11-18T04:47:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/291857\/"},"modified":"2025-11-18T04:47:13","modified_gmt":"2025-11-18T04:47:13","slug":"when-a-mailman-became-van-goghs-muse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/291857\/","title":{"rendered":"When a Mailman Became Van Gogh\u2019s Muse"},"content":{"rendered":"

Art<\/p>\n

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Vincent van Gogh, Postman Joseph Roulin , 1888.\u00a9 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum.<\/p>\n

A bearded man sits on a wicker chair against a pale blue background, wearing a dark blue, double-breasted uniform. The gold buttons of his garment shine from his chest and on his head is a jaunty mailman\u2019s cap. He is the picture of humble workmanship, portrayed with casual immediacy.<\/p>\n

The mailman is not one of Vincent van Gogh<\/a>\u2019s best-known subjects: sunflowers, interiors, himself. But this particular mail carrier, captured in the artist\u2019s 1888 painting Postman Joseph Roulin, was a major influence on his life and work. Van Gogh met Roulin in Arles, France, and painted him\u2014along with his wife and three children\u2014many times. These portraits, completed shortly before the artist was hospitalized for his mental health in early 1889 and ultimately died the following year, reveal Van Gogh\u2019s deep admiration for family life and the formal ambitions that came to the fore late in his career.<\/p>\n

Today, portraits of the entire Roulin family are brought together for the first time in Europe at the Van Gogh Museum<\/a> in Amsterdam. \u201cVan Gogh and the Roulins. Together Again at Last,\u201d on view through January 11, 2026, is organized in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston<\/a>, and features 14 of roughly 25 known Roulin portraits, which are now scattered across the globe.<\/p>\n

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Vincent van Gogh, The Yellow House (The Street) , 1888. Oil on canvas, 72 cm x 91.5 cm. \u00a9 Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation). Courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum.<\/p>\n

Van Gogh in Arles<\/p>\n

While living in Paris, Van Gogh had been inspired by the city\u2019s experimental spirit and the developing aesthetics of Post-Impressionism<\/a>. But the city exhausted him. He had no money to pay models to sit for the portraits he yearned to paint and lacked the charisma to persuade Parisians himself. Overstimulated and longing to paint in nature again, he decamped to Arles in the summer of 1888 with an ambition to found a community of artists. Fellow painter Paul Gauguin<\/a> joined him later that year, and the two lived together in the so-called \u201cYellow House\u201d (captured in The Yellow House (The Street), an 1888 painting also included in the exhibition). <\/p>\n

When he arrived in Arles without his friend Gauguin, Van Gogh struggled socially. Shy and awkward, the artist still struggled to find sitters. That was until he met Joseph Roulin. \u201cHe had a tough time when he tried to make friends\u2014he was a difficult person to get along with\u2014but he found a real friend in the postman,\u201d said Teio Meedendorp, senior researcher at the Van Gogh Museum, in a tour of the show. Roulin was a blue-collar laborer who handled luggage and cargo. Van Gogh admired his honesty, politics, and the industrious, working-class spirit that he embodied.<\/p>\n

In Van Gogh\u2019s initial portrait of Roulin, his arms are stiff and his facial expression awkward, perhaps conveying his discomfort at being the center of attention. The artist also, characteristically, seems to have amended the painting halfway through, changing the perspective to place Roulin\u2019s arms onto a chair and table. <\/p>\n

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Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Camille Roulin , 1888. \u00a9 Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation). Courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum.<\/p>\n

Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Marcelle Roulin ca. 1888. \u00a9 Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation). Courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum.<\/p>\n

Van Gogh idolized portraitists like Rembrandt<\/a> and Frans Hals<\/a>, and he wanted to use formal innovations he observed in Paris to make advances in portrait painting himself. \u201cPainting portraits was the most important thing\u2014the important subject, in fact, for an artist, and especially the modern portrait,\u201d said Meedendorp, explaining Van Gogh\u2019s mindset. Most of all, Van Gogh wanted to focus on depicting working-class people rather than the elites who had traditionally had their portraits painted, often in luxurious surroundings that signified power. The rough, monochromatic background of his first portrait of Joseph Roulin hints at the artist\u2019s vision for the modern portrait: less concerned with depicting detail, or flattering his subject, than with creating an immediate, authentic impression. <\/p>\n

Portraits of the Roulin family<\/p>\n

Roulin was also a family man and represented a vision of domestic idyll that Van Gogh yearned for. \u201cFamily life was for him one of the most important things in life\u2014something he never had,\u201d said Meedendorp. He saw in the Roulins \u201can ideal situation\u2014a simple, hardworking man, a charming wife, their children.\u201d<\/p>\n

After painting Roulin, Van Gogh also portrayed the mailman\u2019s wife, Augustine, and their three children: Armand, Camille, and Marcelle. To Van Gogh\u2019s excitement, he was able to paint the entire family in several sittings, which took place at the Yellow House. The most famous of his portraits of Augustine is known as La Berceuse (1889), which means \u201cthe lullaby\u201d or \u201cwoman who rocks the cradle.\u201d Seated in a chair similar to the one in which Van Gogh painted her husband, Madame Roulin symbolizes homely motherhood, holding in her hand a thread used to rock a nearby cradle. Van Gogh produced five versions of this portrait, three of which are on view in \u201cVan Gogh and the Roulins.\u201d All depict Madame Roulin looking away from the viewer: stoic and noble. <\/p>\n

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Courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum.<\/p>\n

Courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum.<\/p>\n

Van Gogh\u2019s late style <\/p>\n

In the Roulin portraits, Van Gogh refined many of the stylistic ideas that define his late work. Meedendorp described these paintings as \u201ca turning point\u2014the moment when he truly became a modern portraitist.\u201d Instead of situating his sitters in naturalistic interiors, as he had in many of his earlier peasant character study paintings, he placed them against flat, vividly colored backgrounds that are expressive rather than representational. <\/p>\n

Van Gogh\u2019s portrait of Armand Roulin, for example, has a bright turquoise background\u2014a flattened color plane that was new for its time and borrowed its technique from Japanese prints. Using color theory, he employed complementary colors to make his figure lifelike: Outlining the figure in deep blue and using yellow overpainting for the boy\u2019s jacket gives a lifelike, 3D effect, the figure popping against the background. <\/p>\n

The artist also added floral, ornate wallpaper to many of his later paintings, such as La Berceuse and a later portrait of Joseph Roulin from 1889. <\/p>\n

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Vincent van Gogh, Self -Portrait with Pipe and Straw Hat, 1887. \u00a9 Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation) Courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum.<\/p>\n

Joseph Roulin, age 61, 1902. Courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum.<\/p>\n

In that painting, Van Gogh\u2019s depictions veered even further from reality. Here, the mailman\u2019s beard\u2014which Van Gogh previously painted in short, simple tufts\u2014is instead portrayed in flourishing, wavelike spirals. These swirling arabesques are immediately recognizable from perhaps his most famous work, The Starry Night (1889), painted a few months later.<\/p>\n

Joseph Roulin\u2019s friendship<\/p>\n

Joseph Roulin continued to have a great impact on Van Gogh\u2019s personal life even outside his art. In December 1888, Van Gogh experienced a mental health crisis that famously led him to cut off part of his ear. After this episode, it was Roulin who visited him daily, relaying updates to the artist\u2019s brother, Theo. Yet, within weeks, Roulin was transferred to a new postal job in Marseille, France, leaving Van Gogh suddenly without the surrogate family that had steadied him.<\/p>\n

In late January 1889, after another breakdown, Van Gogh voluntarily entered an asylum in nearby Saint-R\u00e9my-de-Provence, France, hoping that isolation and routine might help him recover. His friendship with Roulin endured, even then, by letter. Van Gogh sent the Roulins paintings as New Year\u2019s gifts. <\/p>\n

For Van Gogh, the Roulins were inspiration and evidence of a life he could have lived. They were the last true companions of his Arles years. At the same time, as models and inspiration, they helped Van Gogh achieve something he had wished for throughout his artistic life: to be a truly modern portrait painter. <\/p>\n

JT<\/p>\n

\"JTJ\"<\/p>\n

Josie Thaddeus-Johns<\/p>\n

Josie Thaddeus-Johns is Artsy’s senior editor focused on contemporary art, exhibitions, and artists. Before she joined Artsy in 2023, she was a freelance journalist covering art and culture for the New York Times, Financial Times, Frieze, Art in America, The Guardian, The Economist, and others.<\/p>\n

Originally from London, she has been based in Berlin for many years, with a short stint on the East Coast of the U.S. She studied classics at the University of Oxford and is the author of a book on German design. When she’s not writing about art, she’s on wheels: either cycling or rollerskating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Art Vincent van Gogh, Postman Joseph Roulin , 1888.\u00a9 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Courtesy of the Van…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":291858,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[449,458,459,64,63,460,134,110328,153309,45951],"class_list":{"0":"post-291857","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment","15":"tag-exhibition-reviews","16":"tag-josie-thaddeus-johns","17":"tag-vincent-van-gogh"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291857\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/291858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}