{"id":4427,"date":"2025-04-23T17:16:05","date_gmt":"2025-04-23T17:16:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/04\/23\/exhibition-review-van-gogh-the-roulin-family-portraits-at-the-mfa\/"},"modified":"2025-04-23T17:16:06","modified_gmt":"2025-04-23T17:16:06","slug":"exhibition-review-van-gogh-the-roulin-family-portraits-at-the-mfa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/04\/23\/exhibition-review-van-gogh-the-roulin-family-portraits-at-the-mfa\/","title":{"rendered":"Exhibition Review: \u201cVan Gogh, The Roulin Family Portraits\u201d at the MFA"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Vincent van Gogh, Enclosed Field with Ploughman<\/em>, 1889; Oil on canvas. Bequest of William A. Coolidge, Photograph \u00a9 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 1889, at St. R\u00e9my asylum, seven months before he took his own life, Vincent van Gogh<\/a> wrote to his brother, Theo: \u201cThe rather superstitious idea they have here about painting sometimes depresses me more than I can tell you, because basically it is fairly true that a painter as a man is too absorbed in what his eyes see, and is not sufficiently master of the rest of his life.\u201d<\/p>\n

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A truer statement can\u2019t be found for any great artist. Picasso with his women, and Lucian Freud with the many children he spawned. Caravaggio, who killed Ranuccio Tommasoni. Vermeer and his debts. Goya, Rothko, Munch and Van Gogh, all suffering from mental illness. We can never know if that pressure helped fuel their art or diminish it. It is a myth that artists must suffer to create, as each of us suffers throughout our lives. That said, Van Gogh\u2019s degree of suffering was particularly acute<\/a>. He only painted for the last ten years of his short life, yet he produced 2,100 artworks (860 oil paintings)\u2014most painted in the last two years of his life.<\/p>\n

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Vincent van Gogh, Postman Joseph Roulin<\/em>, 1888; Oil on canvas. Gift of Robert Treat Paine, 2nd, Photograph \u00a9 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We are fortunate to have Van Gogh\u2019s letters that outline both his struggles and joys. He relies on his brother for paints, canvases and even money for food, and always feels he is a burden. Still, he paints. He has seizures, is hospitalized numerous times, and still he paints. In his last year, he wrote, \u201cTo succeed, to have lasting prosperity, you must have a temperament different from mine; I shall never do what I might have done and ought to have wished and pursued.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is heartbreaking to read those missives and equally heartbreaking to see his paintings in museums, glowing with swirling energy and purpose while knowing how much he suffered and doubted. In his dynamic brush strokes, the strange combinations of color and the unusual compositions, you can feel the artist pushing himself hard, trying to \u201ccatch the real and essential.\u201d He often had to fight dizziness, and his paintings are dizzying, as if he painted in a vortex, a force field of dire necessity. \u201cTime does not return, but I am dead set on my work. I know the opportunities of working do not return. Especially in my case, in which a more violent attack may forever destroy my power to paint. During the attacks I feel a coward before the pain and suffering\u2013more of a coward than I ought to be\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

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SEE ALSO: <\/i><\/b>\u201cResistance\u201d at Turner Contemporary Spotlights the Faces of Dissent<\/i><\/b><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Yet there is no cowardice in his paintings now on view at Boston\u2019s Museum of Fine Arts. \u201cVan Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits\u201d comprises twenty works by Van Gogh\u2014the Roulin portraits, self-portraits and landscapes\u2014as well as photographs, early Dutch art including a Rembrandt etching and engraving, Japanese woodblock prints and letters from Joseph Roulin to Van Gogh that illuminate the artist\u2019s creative process. Curators Nienke Bakker<\/a> of the Van Gogh Museum and Katie Hanson<\/a> of the MFA have put together a deeply moving tribute to Van Gogh\u2019s extraordinary mind in paint.<\/p>\n

The exhibition has a tunneling aura. Some of the walls are deep purple, the rooms are dimly lit and each painting dazzles. The first works on view are the well-known The Yellow House (The Street)<\/i> from 1988 and The Bedroom<\/i> from 1989. The former is a view of the street where he lived in Arles, showing the house that contained his studio downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs, where Gauguin lived and worked beside Van Gogh<\/a> for a period of time. The colors are delicious\u2014the buttery yellow house canopied with a deep ultramarine and cobalt blue sky and the pink awning down the street capture the light of Arles that Van Gogh favored in his work. Gauguin wrote to a friend, \u201cOh yes! He loved yellow, did\u00a0good Vincent, the painter from Holland, gleams of sunlight warming his soul, which detested fog. A craving for warmth.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Vincent van Gogh, The Yellow House (The Street)<\/em>, 1888; Oil on canvas. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent Van Gogh Foundation), \u00a9 Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation), Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In Van Gogh\u2019s portraits, he wanted to capture a \u2018metaphysical magic\u2019 in his subjects, and in Postman Joseph Roulin <\/i>(1888), Roulin sits erect, earnest and noble, wearing his postman\u2019s blue uniform and cap. \u201cHe has a Socratic head that\u2019s interesting to paint,\u201d Vincent wrote to Theo. Roulin was for Van Gogh like a big brother. In one week, Van Gogh painted five of the Roulin family that he loved so well: Roulin, his wife Augustine and their three children, with their \u201cRussian look even though they are very French\u2014common people like the peasants in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky novels.\u201d<\/p>\n

In several of these family portraits, the individuals are backdropped with a Matisse-like background of flowers. In Lullaby: Madame Augustine Roulin Rocking a Cradle (La Berceuse)<\/i> from 1889, Augustine is surrounded by Van Gogh\u2019s invented wallpaper of dahlias. He associated the flowers with his mother; he said they \u201csung a lullaby of color.\u201d The show also has portraits of the two sons and three of the baby, Marcelle. In them all, it is the eyes that captivate, as well as the thick vigor of paint. Sometimes the flesh of the person reflects the color of the background, as in Camille Roulin<\/i> (1888).<\/p>\n

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Vincent van Gogh, Lullaby: Madame Augustine Roulin Rocking a Cradle (La Berceuse)<\/em>, 1889; Oil on canvas. Bequest of John T. Spaulding, Photograph \u00a9 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Two landscapes are especially captivating. Ravine<\/i> (1889) is reminiscent of Van Gogh\u2019s last painting<\/a>, Tree Roots<\/i> (not in the show).<\/i> In both, rocks, water<\/keyword>, and roots are in furious movement as if time was of the essence, rushing furiously. Enclosed Field with Ploughman<\/i>, 1889, with its tiny windmill against a pale sky and furrowed wheat fields with a man and his donkey, is a tender tribute to a laboring farmer. \u201cI can see myself in the future when I shall have some success, regretting my solitude and wretchedness here, when I saw the reaper in the field below between the iron bars of the cell. Misfortune is good for something.\u201d<\/p>\n

Raising of Lazarus (after Rembrandt)<\/i> from 1890 is similarly poignant. The yearning in the woman, Lazarus barely corporal, the spiraling sun, the hills of Arles in the background, the deep green and surrounding pale yellows, all seem to portend Van Gogh\u2019s suicide a mere two months later. Equally moving are the exhibition\u2019s three self-portraits, all remarkably different, illustrating his mercurial states of mind.<\/p>\n

Overall, \u201cThe Roulin Family Portraits\u201d highlights Van Gogh\u2019s furious attempt to paint despite his deep sorrow and \u201cunbearable hallucinations.\u201d The show presents the last two years of his life, a deeply troubling time, in bold relief. He wrote in his last year, \u201cI am now trying to recover like a man who meant to commit suicide and, finding the water<\/keyword> too cold, tries to regain the bank.\u201d He was only 37 when the joy he took in painting could no longer sustain him.<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/b>Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits<\/b><\/a>\u201d is on view through September 7, 2025, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.<\/b><\/p>\n

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Vincent van Gogh, Self Portrait<\/em>, 1889; Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney, 1998.74.5, Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\t\t\t\t\"Van<\/p><\/div>\n