At the MFA, van Gogh's brief time in the sun

Boston Globe

28-03-2025

There, he made fast friends with Joseph Roulin, a local postman, and was swiftly absorbed into his nuclear family. It can be hard to believe that van Gogh painted for barely 10 years all told, before his death by suicide in 1890. In that time, he made 35 self-portraits. During his brief stint in Arles, barely more than a year between 1888 and 1889, he painted the Roulins, together and apart, almost 30 times (14 of which are here). They inspired in him a belief in himself, and in the world, he may never have otherwise felt. They cared for him as his health and spirit unraveled, bringing him to and from the hospital. When he died, just two months after moving back to the outskirts of Paris to be closer to his brother Theo, it was as all but a member of the Roulin family.
Vincent van Gogh, 'Postman Joseph Roulin,' 1888.
Vincent van Gogh/Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
For an artist so towering and exhaustively explored, it can feel like there's nothing left to be said. But along with that fame comes a kind of shorthand that sands down nuance into category and cliché: Tortured artist, check. (To be fair, severing his own ear in a fit of despair didn't help.)
But 'The Roulin Family Portraits,' a collaboration with the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, defies the urge to gloss over. It's a counterveiling revelation and a feat of intimate storytelling, a swim in the complexities of his rich emotional life in his final years. Katie Hanson, the MFA's curator on the exhibition, is quick to establish the artist's sunny state of mind as he made his southern move. The show begins in a roomy gallery with rich aubergine walls and just two paintings: a self-portrait from 1887, made as van Gogh was preparing to leave the city for the south; and 'The Yellow House,' 1888, where he would set up his Arles studio and make his new home.
Advertisement
'Ravine' by Vincent van Gogh, 1889.
Vincent van Gogh/Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The two paintings are almost night and day: The self-portrait terse and dark, freighted with the anxieties of urban life, the Arles street scene radiant — bright, buttery, sun-drenched. It feels like a portrait of optimism itself, and better days ahead. Even his signature brush strokes, heavy and full of flourish, feel weightless with anticipatory joy: Thick crosshatches of paint animate a cobalt-blue sky, while saffron squibs wriggle in the foreground, bringing life to the dusty road.
On a recent walkthrough, Hanson told me that van Gogh had a nervous excitement about his pending relocation. Eager to start fresh with the south's radiant light, he was determined to work on portraiture, and to insert himself in the lineage of the old masters from his native Holland, like Rembrandt and van Dyck.
To paint portraits, he would need people, and the studio he rented was purpose-built to receive them: a ground floor storefront on the village's bustling main street with a big picture window. Van Gogh invited onlookers and subjects alike; he imagined the studio as the hub of an artist's community, a nexus of shared creative resources and ideas.
Advertisement
Vincent van Gogh, 'Lullaby: Madame Augustine Roulin Rocking a Cradle (La Berceuse),' 1889. Oil on canvas.
Vincent van Gogh/Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
That much is enough to puncture the perception of the artist's hermetic reputation. Obliterating it completely was the fast friendship he struck with Roulin, whom he met at a cafe. Van Gogh was as excited about painting the postman, with his great thatch of beard, as he was in their communion; they agreed that van Gogh would compensate Roulin for his time with food and drink at the cafe, a social link that both men embraced.
Van Gogh's sense of purpose was deepening. Portrait painting 'is the thing that enables me to cultivate what's best and most serious in me,'
he wrote to his brother Theo back in Paris, who had tirelessly, fruitlessly tried to broker his art to buyers. 'Postman Joseph Roulin,' his first major portrait of Joseph, in 1888, makes that case. Captured in three-quarter pose, Joseph's stance is stoic, regal, assured, with the brass buttons of his double-breasted postal uniform shimmering in the inky blue of his coat.
Van Gogh had found a subject worthy of his art-historical aspirations; nearby, Hanson has hung portraits by the Dutch Renaissance master Frans Hals, whom van Gogh revered. He would pay homage to other masters, like Rembrandt, in his portraits of Augustine, Roulin's wife, whom he painted more than any other.
From left, Vincent van Gogh: "Armand Roulin," 1888; "Lullaby: Madame Augustine Roulin Rocking a Cradle (La Berceuse)," 1889; "Portrait of Joseph Roulin," 1889, in 'Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits' at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Van Gogh had longed to be a husband and father; his brief, intimate time with the Roulins and their three children would be as close as he would come. And his devotion to his art as a connection to the family was tireless.
A hub at the core of the exhibition features just four paintings, but it simmers with affection: a portrait of the oldest Roulin son, Armand, a prototypically sullen teen, is radiant in van Gogh's hands, with his dour expression offset by rosy cheeks and a background of emerald green. 'Madame Roulin and Her Baby,' 1888, is almost disturbingly vibrant, with thatches of paint tracking the infant's arms and cheeks; you can almost see her growing. Madame, subordinate, holds the child up, so van Gogh — and the viewer — can see her better; Augustine is practically swallowed by the furious ebullience of turbulent yellow behind her.
Advertisement
Happy times, of course, were not to last; this is, after all, van Gogh. He welcomed his friend, Paul Gauguin,
Two portraits of Augustine Roulin from the fall of 1889; on the left, by Paul Gauguin; on the right, by Vincent van Gogh. As seen in 'Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits' at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Their creative frictions were productive for a time — in their two months at close quarters, van Gogh
That left him again in the embrace of the Roulins. Joseph visited him in the hospital, and wrote letters to Theo, keeping him up to date on his brother's condition. The exhibition displays several notes exchanged between the three men; one tender entry has Joseph describing to Theo the brightening of Vincent's mood on returning home to the yellow house after weeks in the hospital: '[H]e is as sweet as a lamb,' Joseph assured him, and that his painting is 'all he thinks of.'
Advertisement
But here, the show — and Vincent's life — takes a darker turn. Joseph was transferred to Marseille for work, and the men's friendship carried on in letters, many of which are here. Van Gogh continued to paint at the yellow house for a time; Augustine and the children were still in Arles, not able to relocate to Marseille immediately. But soon, he was alone. In May, 1889, he checked himself into an asylum in nearby Saint-Remy,
Vincent van Gogh, 'The Bedroom,' 1889.
Vincent van Gogh/Courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago/Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
For all the misery he suffered, this brief chapter of unadulterated joy gives pause. He painted Augustine eight times, seeing in her a matriarchal poise and calm that his tumultuous life often lacked. His portrayals of her brim with respect and admiration; 'Lullaby: Madame Augustine Roulin Rocking a Cradle,' from 1889, places her, stolid and resolute, against a swirl of floral motifs and loose brush strokes — serene and stable, amid the chaos of life.
And in the nearby fields and streams, he found unbridled beauty. 'Ravine,' 1889, a cascade of blue-green collapsing in on itself, is one of the most extraordinary works of his life; 'Enclosed Field with Ploughman,' 1889, with its heavy shadows banding golden fields of grain almost like solid objects, pays tribute to the southern light he so adored.
Vincent van Gogh, 'Self Portrait,' 1889.
Vincent van Gogh/Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The show closes as it opened: With a self-portrait, this one from his 1889 convalescence. 'I began the first day I got up,' he wrote to Theo, 'thin, pale as a devil.' With Joseph now gone, its postman-blue tone feels almost like longing for his lost friend. Finally, there is 'The Bedroom,' a heavy symbol of his new life in the yellow house and the promise it held. It's a symbol, too, of that imagined paradise lost; he painted it after he committed himself to the asylum, his cherished room no longer his.
The episode tugs at the heartstrings — not only for the art he never had the chance to make, but the life he never had. Van Gogh knew better than anyone that contentment was fleeting, and to take nothing for granted. Better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.
VAN GOGH: THE ROULIN FAMILY PORTRAITS
March 30-Sept. 7. Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 465 Huntington Ave. 617-267-9300,
Murray Whyte can be reached at