Van Gogh's Arles Portraits
In Arles Van Gogh wanted to paint people more than anything, and the postman Joseph Roulin and his family gave him more sittings than anyone else.
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About the series
Joseph Roulin worked for the post office at Arles station and became one of Vincent's few close friends in the town. Over the winter of 1888 and 1889 Van Gogh painted the whole family: Joseph in his blue uniform with its gold buttons, his wife Augustine, their sons Armand and Camille, and the baby Marcelle. Augustine is also La Berceuse, holding the rope of a cradle we never see, against a wallpaper of flowers. He painted that composition five times.
Models were hard to find and he paid them when he could. The Zouave was a soldier from the barracks, the Mousmé a young girl whose title comes from a novel set in Japan, and Patience Escalier an old farmhand who had once been a herdsman in the Camargue. Madame Ginoux, who ran the Café de la Gare where he lodged at first, sat for L'Arlésienne in the local costume. The first portrait of Joseph Roulin, from 1888, is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and La Mousmé is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
The backgrounds are flat, strong colours, and the faces are close to life size. One portrait can hold a wall on its own.
