The Van Gogh Museum is bringing a scattered family back together this fall to honor a postal worker, his wife and their children who sat as models for the Dutch master at time when he was struggling to make friends in a French town.
Portraits of the expansively bearded postman Joseph Roulin, his wife, two sons and baby daughter have been brought together for an exhibition titled "Van Gogh and the Roulins. Together Again at Last." The show collects paintings of the family from museums around the world and even features an armchair from the artist's studio in Arles in the southern region of Provence.
The show is in Amsterdam after a run at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which provided one of the centerpieces of the exhibition, a portrait of the postman (he was actually a postal clerk) resplendent in his blue uniform with gold buttons and trim sitting in an armchair made of local willow from Provence.
While preparing the show, the Van Gogh Museum found the very chair featured in the portrait in its storerooms and is exhibiting it for the first time. It was deemed too fragile to be sent to Boston for the show there.
"As it turns out, we have this chair in our collection, but we have never shown it before," said Van Gogh Museum Director Emilie Gordenker. "And it just shows you when you start to work on a topic — in this case, the Roulin family portraits — all kinds of things you might never have thought about before come up and it’s really exciting to rediscover, as it were, your own collection."
Vincent van Gogh created a total of 26 portraits of the family in a burst of creative activity from July 1888 to April 1889. There are 14 on show at the museum alongside works by his friend and fellow painter Paul Gauguin and by Dutch Golden Age masters Rembrandt van Rijn and Frans Hals, whose works were major sources of inspiration.
"Many people consider his Arles period really his peak," Gordenker said. "I’m not sure we totally agree with that, but it is definitely a moment when he turns a corner ... his power as an artist really comes out."
In an upstairs room, the museum has created a life-size facade of the yellow house that Van Gogh used as his studio in Arles, where Roulin became more than just a model to Van Gogh.
"While Roulin isn't exactly old enough to be like a father to me, all the same he has silent solemnities and tenderness for me like an old soldier would have for a young one," the artist wrote in a letter to his brother, Theo, in April 1889.
Nienke Bakker, who curated the show along with Katie Hanson from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, said the Arles period was crucial to Van Gogh's artistry.
"He literally says painting people brings out the best in me, but also makes me feel part of humanity. So it’s a very important thing," Bakker said.
She said that the chair went into storage after Van Gogh left Arles and was then passed to the artist's relatives and ultimately to the museum.
The museum is now displaying the chair alongside the painting from the Boston museum that features Roulin and the chair.
"It’s quite moving to have of course this fantastic portrait here, but also to to be able to show the actual chair he was sitting in and to realize that it was quite a simple small chair," Bakker said.
The exhibition opens Friday and runs through Jan. 11.
