This portrait of Joseph Roulin is one of six that van Gogh painted of his close friend, a postal employee in the southern French town of Arles. In 1888, van Gogh moved to Arles, a fifteen-hour train ride from Paris, in the hopes of creating an artist cooperative. The plan never came to fruition, and the artist found himself lonely and isolated—a situation exacerbated by his inability to speak the challenging local Provençal dialect. Van Gogh found comfort and companionship with the Roulin family, and they became the subjects of many of his most important paintings.

　Van Gogh was drawn to Roulin's distinctive facial features, his devotion to his wife and children, and to the exceptional kindness he demonstrated toward the artist (when van Gogh was hospitalized in 1888, Roulin looked after his studio and checked in on him repeatedly). In this portrait, believed to be painted from memory, Roulin is depicted in the postal uniform he always wore proudly, set against an imaginative backdrop of swirling flowers. In one of the many letters van Gogh sent to his brother Theo, he wrote that of all subjects, "the modern portrait" excited him the most. As he elaborated, "I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize, and which we try to convey by the actual radiance and vibration of our coloring."

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　Joseph Roulin—who appears in this portrait resplendent in his blue uniform against a floral background that echoes his lush, swirling beard—was among Vincent van Gogh’s most important friends. The two lived on the same street in Arles, in the South of France, where Roulin worked for the postal service. Van Gogh was fascinated by his friend’s face, but he was at least as taken with the man’s character. Roulin was an ardent socialist, vehement in his support of the left wing of French republican politics. Perhaps more importantly for the lonely, isolated artist, Roulin was also the devoted father of a large family.

　Van Gogh painted Roulin for the first time in the summer of 1888. Many other portraits would follow, as would portraits of his wife and three children. Van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo, of his excitement about “the modern portrait,” a picture that expresses character not by the imitation of the sitter’s appearance but through the independent, vivid life of color. Among his influences in his pursuit of modern portraiture was Paul Gauguin, who worked with van Gogh in Arles in the fall of 1888. Gauguin urged less dependence on observation and more reliance on memory and intuition. This advice may have been especially telling in the case of van Gogh’s later portraits of Roulin (including this one) which were likely painted after the postman had left Arles for a better paying position in Marseilles.

　Spurred by an argument with Gauguin, van Gogh underwent a psychotic episode in which he menaced his fellow artist and then sliced off a part of his own ear. Roulin tended to van Gogh in the aftermath of this incident, seeing him committed to the psychiatric hospital in Arles, watching over him during his internment there, writing to his family to reassure them of his health, and providing constant solace to the recovering artist. As van Gogh struggled to regain his mental equilibrium, this friendship and support, renewed during Roulin’s return visits after he had moved to Marseilles, became even more fundamentally important for him.

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