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’s cap. He is the picture of humble workmanship, portrayed with casual immediacy.
The mailman is not one of Vincent van Gogh’s best-known subjects: sunflowers, interiors, himself. But this particular mail carrier, captured in the artist’s 1888 painting Postman Joseph Roulin, was a major influence on his life and work. Van Gogh met Roulin in Arles, France, and painted him—along with his wife and three children—many 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’s deep admiration for family life and the formal ambitions that came to the fore late in his career.
Today, portraits of the entire Roulin family are brought together for the first time in Europe at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. “Van Gogh and the Roulins. Together Again at Last,” on view through January 11, 2026, is organized in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and features 14 of roughly 25 known Roulin portraits, which are now scattered across the globe.
Van Gogh in Arles
While living in Paris, Van Gogh had been inspired by the city’s experimental spirit and the developing aesthetics of Post-Impressionism. 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 joined him later that year, and the two lived together in the so-called “Yellow House” (captured in The Yellow House (The Street), an 1888 painting also included in the exhibition).
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. “He had a tough time when he tried to make friends—he was a difficult person to get along with—but he found a real friend in the postman,” 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.
In Van Gogh’s 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’s arms onto a chair and table.
Van Gogh idolized portraitists like Rembrandt and Frans Hals, and he wanted to use formal innovations he observed in Paris to make advances in portrait painting himself. “Painting portraits was the most important thing—the important subject, in fact, for an artist, and especially the modern portrait,” said Meedendorp, explaining Van Gogh’s 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’s vision for the modern portrait: less concerned with depicting detail, or flattering his subject, than with creating an immediate, authentic impression.
Portraits of the Roulin family
Roulin was also a family man and represented a vision of domestic idyll that Van Gogh yearned for. “Family life was for him one of the most important things in life—something he never had,” said Meedendorp. He saw in the Roulins “an ideal situation—a simple, hardworking man, a charming wife, their children.”
After painting Roulin, Van Gogh also portrayed the mailman’s wife, Augustine, and their three children: Armand, Camille, and Marcelle. To Van Gogh’s 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 “the lullaby” or “woman who rocks the cradle.” 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 “Van Gogh and the Roulins.” All depict Madame Roulin looking away from the viewer: stoic and noble.
Van Gogh’s late style
In the Roulin portraits, Van Gogh refined many of the stylistic ideas that define his late work. Meedendorp described these paintings as “a turning point—the moment when he truly became a modern portraitist.” 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.
Van Gogh’s portrait of Armand Roulin, for example, has a bright turquoise background—a 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’s jacket gives a lifelike, 3D effect, the figure popping against the background.
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.
In that painting, Van Gogh’s depictions veered even further from reality. Here, the mailman’s beard—which Van Gogh previously painted in short, simple tufts—is 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.
Joseph Roulin’s friendship
Joseph Roulin continued to have a great impact on Van Gogh’s 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’s 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.
In late January 1889, after another breakdown, Van Gogh voluntarily entered an asylum in nearby Saint-Rémy-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’s gifts.
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.
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