When van Gogh Fled South, This Family Gave Him Purpose
February 1888, and it's freezing in the South of France. Vincent van Gogh had left Paris after two years of art-world hustle, deepening depressions and a worn welcome from his brother Theo, who had housed the difficult painter. He packed for the small river town of Arles, hoping, he wrote, for 'even more color and even more sun.' Instead he found a snowstorm.
He painted orchards and landscapes in the cold, well into spring, staking his easel to the ground to beat the wind. But by July, 'I haven't made a centimeter's progress into people's hearts,' he complained to Theo. To get models an artist needs either money or social grace. Vincent lacked both. 'His disappointments often embittered him,' his sister Willemien wrote, 'and made him not a normal person.'
That changed when at the bar he met Joseph Roulin, a postman 'with a head like that of Socrates,' he marveled in July, 'a more interesting man than many people' and a 'raging republican' who had 'almost no nose, a high forehead, bald pate, small gray eyes, high-colored full cheeks, a big beard, pepper and salt, big ears.' Roulin became a confidant, diplomat and crucial sitter. Over the next half year, van Gogh painted 26 portraits of Roulin, his wife, Augustine, and their three children. (Theo he painted only once.)
You feel that outpouring at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which has reunited 14 of these likenesses in the impressive and record-correcting exhibition 'Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits.' Augmented with 30 other works by van Gogh and his influences, plus archival material, the show examines the sitter relationship that most reliably allowed van Gogh to test the spiritual qualities of color and paint handling. It is the largest exhibition (outdoing a 2001 show on Joseph in New York) on an iconic but little-known family in art history.
It is also a powerful redraft to the myth of van Gogh's constant solitude. He was in fact a social creature. More than any show I have seen, this one revives the centrifugal pull of people you detect in his letters.
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