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.
Four paintings of Roulin are here. In the first, July 1888, his pink face looks alert, slightly amused. The brushwork is bright, stiff, clean, the background powder blue. There are also two lattice-hatched drawings in ink.
What lay behind them? Friendships across class lines often begin in transaction and bloom into trust. While Roulin’s wife was away giving birth to their third child, he modeled in exchange for back issues of the radical magazine La Lanterne, drinks and meals with the painter, and conversation. For van Gogh, Roulin offered a face for experimentation. The final Roulin, painted in early 1889 and also on view, is wilder, shaggy with amber and teal, the beard a double knot of braided purls — envelope-pushing that suggests van Gogh really saw his model. Nearby hang caricatures by Daumier and Hals’s “Merry Drinker” (circa 1630), on loan from Amsterdam: like the Roulins, terrific elevations of the face.
In November Roulin brought his wife and children to the so-called Yellow House, which van Gogh shared with Paul Gauguin in hopes of an artist colony. From that session, a bust of the middle child, Camille, staring off with mouth open, arranges loud panes of orange and red lake against crystalline blues. This clang make sense when hung beside the nishiki-e woodblock prints of 1860s Japan, which van Gogh had admired in Paris — prints that convey their harmony through strategic clashes of primary color.
In van Gogh’s earlier Paris portraits, like the fierce self-portrait on view here from 1887, his hatch-strokes had been jubilant, even rainbowish, but nonetheless tidily pointillist with skin tones and light — in the ballpark of his post-Impressionist contemporaries Georges Seurat and Paul Signac.
In Arles, he went further. Here he abandoned the tonal subtleties that Parisian critics had pressured upon him. He retaliated with pure, harsh colors. “You can’t be at the pole and the Equator at the same time,” he wrote of the allure of extremes. In the solo portraits of Augustine Roulin titled “La Berceuse” (“The Lullaby”) — two versions of which are on view here — her face is Dijon yellow, thatched like roofing into the needly brushstrokes of a carrot-colored bun pulled tight. (Gauguin’s take on Augustine, also on view, is notably yellow, too.) Now look at her hands: standard Caucasian, and flatly applied. It’s as if van Gogh is paint-coding zones of her soul, with the face on high alert. “I’ve never devised anything better,” he wrote.
She holds a purse strap. Or, no, a tether. To what? A clue appears nearby: a mezzotint of the Holy Family printed in England the century before. In it, St. Anne, Mary’s mother, tugs a cord to rock her grandson’s cradle. As a young man van Gogh had hung a version of this print, based on a purported Rembrandt, in his room. He hung it again, in 1882, over the crib of a prostitute’s child he helped shelter in The Hague. By quoting that element in his Augustine portrait years later, he casts the sitter as aloof and alone, while quietly binding her to an ideal of motherhood by this second umbilical.
In reality Augustine posed with no such cord. Van Gogh added it, along with an invented wallpaper of “dahlias, a flower that he associated with his own mother,” we learn from the curators, Katie Hanson of the M.F.A. and Nienke Bakker of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (where the show travels next). He had cut ties with his own mother after being asked to leave their home. Did he see her in this stranger?
The artist’s abandonment fears flared again, perhaps, when at Christmastime Theo announced his engagement to Johanna Bonger. A fight with Gauguin worsened things. In a fit, Vincent mutilated his ear and collapsed. Gauguin fled. Theo hurried down to the hospital but left that day. There to monitor Vincent during those hellish weeks was Joseph Roulin.
His letters to Theo and Willemien, displayed here, make the mailman finally, historically real: a friend in the beginnings of loyalty, flung out of his depth. Dec. 26: “I am sorry to tell you that I think he is lost.” Dec. 28: “My wife went to see him, and he hid his face when he saw her coming.” Jan. 3: “My friend Vincent has entirely recovered.” Mood swings at this extreme, viewed through a newcomer, say much about those who loved and endured the painter.
In January Roulin was reassigned to Marseilles, on the coast. Four more letters addressed to “Monsieur and dear friend Vincent” are touching. Now alone, van Gogh remained in and out of care in Arles until summer 1889, when he entered the asylum in nearby Saint-Rémy. There his stained-glass-like colors and atmospheres took even steeper flight, into inspired if uneven directions he never got the chance to resolve: In summer 1890 he took his life. This show drops a hint of how he would evolve stylistically in his short remaining time, with a blinding gold version of Rembrandt’s “The Raising of Lazarus,” from 1890, starring versions of himself and Augustine.
For an artist on the fringe, this show seems to say, breakthroughs in style and in affection can be the same. You can almost hear the thumbnail crack as the curators squeeze this dollop of insight from the spent tube of Vincent’s finale. Since the pandemic alone, exhibitions on those resplendent but doomed two years have originated in Dallas, New York, Paris and London. (Only the London show had a Roulin, the M.F.A.’s Augustine, making Boston worth the trip.)
Copying his own work — or “versioning” it — was how van Gogh worked, socially and aesthetically. The show’s hanging muddles that fact. In one gallery, a bust of baby Marcelle by van Gogh on loan from Amsterdam, her Prussian blue eyes set into the doughy face like marbles, is tonal, pink. In a version hanging in another gallery, from a private collection, she looks almost bearded with shading. With distance the two paintings feel redundant. Didn’t I just see this?
He sent several versions to the Roulins. (They sold them after he died. Theo’s allowance to Vincent had exceeded what that family of five lived on.) He sent others to Theo, an art dealer, hoping for a sale. The Amsterdam “Marcelle” went to him. Johanna, while pregnant, would gaze at the painted baby in their Paris apartment. They named their son Vincent.
This muscular show wants to prove that van Gogh’s copying habit was a form of devotion. Gauguin and Emile Bernard, another colleague on view here, urged him to paint from imagination. But he didn’t invent. What he possessed, all these faces remind us, was an intensity and compulsiveness of looking that, when spent on canvas, could elevate a thing in space to its loudest possible reality: a sunflower, a mother, a constellation. When directed inward, that intensity felled him.
Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits
Through Sept. 7 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 465 Huntington Avenue, Boston; 617-267-9300, mfa.org.
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