Van Gogh left Paris for Arles, a small town in southern France, in February 1888, where he befriended a local postal worker, Joseph Roulin. This portrait is the first of six Van Gogh painted of Roulin. A rather sensitive portrayal, he highlights Roulin’s expressive, hard-working hands and dense, bristly beard, which he rendered in abbreviated vertical brushstrokes and compared, in his letters, to that of Socrates. Believing in the expressive capacity of color, Van Gogh embraced the vibrant contrast of his friend’s blue postal uniform with its yellow trimmings. Van Gogh also painted several portraits of Madame Roulin (48.548), as well as their children, delighted, as he wrote, to depict “a whole family.”
Van Gogh left Paris for Arles, a small town in southern France, in February 1888, where he befriended a local postal worker, Joseph Roulin. This portrait is the first of six Van Gogh painted of Roulin. A rather sensitive portrayal, he highlights Roulin’s expressive, hard-working hands and dense, bristly beard, which he rendered in abbreviated vertical brushstrokes and compared, in his letters, to that of Socrates. Believing in the expressive capacity of color, Van Gogh embraced the vibrant contrast of his friend’s blue postal uniform with its yellow trimmings. Van Gogh also painted several portraits of Madame Roulin (48.548), as well as their children, delighted, as he wrote, to depict “a whole family.”
