Vincent van Gogh’s portraits of the Roulin family are the focus of a new exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The show brings together 14 of the 26 portraits Van Gogh made of the family, including three drawings and 11 paintings. Joseph Roulin was a postman in Arles, France, and a close friend of Van Gogh.
The artist chose to depict the modest, working-class Roulin family during his time in Arles, marking a significant chapter in his career. The exhibition is co-organized with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Katie Hanson, the MFA’s curator of European paintings, said the idea for the show arose when a colleague from the Van Gogh Museum pointed out that the MFA had portraits of the Roulin parents while the Van Gogh Museum had portraits of the children.
The two museums gathered additional loans from institutions like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Kunsthal in Rotterdam. The exhibition is arranged in three central rooms, with the MFA’s two portraits of the Roulin parents anchoring opposite ends.
Focus on Van Gogh’s Roulin portraits
The vibrant colors of Van Gogh’s paintings contrast against rich purple walls, evoking a warm familial embrace. To provide context for Van Gogh’s time in Provence, the exhibition includes his 1888 painting “The Yellow House (The Street),” on loan from the Van Gogh Museum. A physical recreation of Van Gogh’s studio gives visitors a tangible sense of the artist’s environment.
The show also highlights works that inspired Van Gogh, such as Frans Hals’s “The Merry Drinker” from the Rijksmuseum and Louis Le Nain’s “Portrait of a Family in an Interior” from the Louvre. Portraits by other admired artists, like Rembrandt’s “Portrait of Aeltje Uylenburgh” from the MFA’s collection, offer further insight into Van Gogh’s influences. The exhibition opened on March 30 and runs until September 7 in the Ann and Graham Gund Gallery.
It is the first Van Gogh exhibition at the MFA in 25 years. Co-curator Hanson hopes the show will give visitors a new perspective on Van Gogh and the impact of friendship. “I hope that people are really thinking about the importance of friendship, the importance of the care that we offer one another and that you can change someone’s life even for a short time,” she said.
