great portraits #10



It would be possible to choose a dozen great portraits by Van Gogh - including several of the self-portraits - but I especially like the series he painted of the local postman at Arles Joseph Roulin. Roulin was a great friend to the struggling and troubled painter, and surely deserved to be immortalised in this way. Van Gogh, in his self-imposed exile in the South of France was often lonely, and the postman bringing news from his friends and family elsewhere would have been an important figure in his life, but Roulin was an interesting character in his own right and Van Gogh invests these portraits with warmth, intelligence and a sort of melancholy nobility. In each of the portraits the prominence of the word 'Postes' on the hat seems to somehow anchor these painterly flights of fancy in the real world. In fact the entire Roulin family welcomed Van Gogh into their lives, and he painted them all, from the baby girl with staring, black olive eyes to the extravagantly bearded father. Joseph Roulin died in 1902, about the time his old friend's genius was finally beginning to be recognised by the art world.