[ Source: BBC News ]
At the toughest, most turbulent time of his life, the Post-Impressionist painter was supported by an unlikely soulmate, Joseph Roulin, a postman in Arles.
A new exhibition explores this close friendship, and how it benefited art history.
On 23 December, 1888, the day that Vincent van Gogh mutilated his ear and presented the severed portion to a sex worker, he was tended to by an unlikely soulmate: the postman Joseph Roulin.
A rare figure of stability during Van Gogh’s mentally turbulent two years in Arles, in the South of France, Roulin ensured that he received care in a psychiatric hospital, and visited him while he was there, writing to the artist’s brother Theo to update him on his condition. He paid Van Gogh’s rent while he was being cared for, and spent the entire day with him when he was discharged two weeks later.
“Roulin… has a silent gravity and a tenderness for me as an old soldier might have for a young one,” Van Gogh wrote to Theo the following April, describing Roulin as “such a good soul and so wise and so full of feeling”.
Paying homage to this touching relationship is the exhibition Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits, opening at the MFA Boston, USA, on 30 March, before moving on to its co-organiser, the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, in October.
This is the first exhibition devoted to portraits of all five members of the Roulin family. It features more than 20 paintings by Van Gogh, alongside works by important influences on the Dutch artist, including 17th-Century
Dutch masters Rembrandt and Frans Hals, and the French artist Paul Gauguin, who lived for two months with Van Gogh in Arles.
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