“What I’m most passionate about, much much more than all the rest in my profession—is the portrait, the modern portrait,” wrote Vincent van Gogh in June 1890. From 1888 to 1889, Van Gogh devoted himself to creating a series of portraits of one family, the Roulins. The Arles postman Joseph Roulin, his wife Augustine, and their three children inspired an astonishing set of twenty-three painted portraits, plus three drawings.
This book offers the first in-depth exploration of this group of works, which Van Gogh hoped would express “the model’s thoughts, his soul,” and comment about human existence in a more universal sense. Relying on letters from the artist, archival material, contemporary criticism, and technical studies, Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits features insightful essays on Van Gogh’s practice, his beliefs about portraiture, his personal relationship with the Roulins, and his admiration for his contemporaries as well as seventeenth-century Dutch portraitists.
