Date: 26-06-2005
Owning Institution: van Gogh Museum
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”        
Subject: 19th Century    20th Century      

In a week’s time “Vincent van Gogh: Master Draughtsman” will open at the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The exhibition draws together many of van Gogh’s most powerful drawings, from the museum’s own collections and from around the world. This week’s picture, loaned for the occasion by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, is the artist’s ink and chalk drawing of his friend Joseph Roulin, a postal worker. It was done between 31 July and 6 August, in the year 1888.

Van Gogh had met Roulin at the Café de la Gare in Arles, where the two used to drink together. Roulin was republican, Boulangiste, anti-clerical, a man who impressed the painter with his directness, his decency and his heartfelt political convictions. “I don’t know if I can convey the postman as I feel him,” he wrote to his brother, Theo van Gogh, in the same year that he created this drawing. “The man is a revolutionary… He is probably considered a good republican, because he heartily detests the republic which we now enjoy, and because all in all he is somewhat doubtful and a little disillusioned with the republican idea itself. But one day I saw him singing the Marseillaise, and I thought I was watching ’89 – not next year, but the one 99 years ago. It was a Delacroix, a Daumier, straight out of old Holland…”

The painter sensed that there was more to this living embodiment of the spirit of the French Revolution, as he saw him, than met the eye. “I have rarely seen a man of Roulin’s temperament, there is something in him terribly like Socrates, ugly as a satyr, as Michelet called him, ‘until on the last day a god appeared in him that illumined the Parthenon!’” Van Gogh, who was never very good with money, was also impressed by the way in which Roulin managed, uncomplainingly, to support his wife and two children on a monthly salary of 135 francs. This was only a little more than half of the monthly allowance the painter himself received from his endlessly supportive brother, Theo – who gave him 250 francs a month, and paid for his painting materials on top.

Van Gogh evidently found Roulin picturesque. After all, he had described him as a character who could have stepped straight out of one of Honore Daumier’s social caricatures, or one of Delacroix’s paintings, or an old Dutch genre scene. But when it came to creating Roulin’s portrait, he did his best simply to draw the man whom he saw in front of him. He did not get him to pose but had him just sitting in a chair staring into space. The subject wears his postman’s double-breasted coat and his cap baldly emblazoned with the word “Postes”. The strength of Roulin’s character and feelings is suggested not only by the intense, faraway gaze in his eyes, but also by the vigour with which van Gogh has drawn the lines etched so deeply, by life, around his eyes and into his brow. For all the matter-of-factness of the composition, the painter’s romantic sense of his subject as, not merely a human being, but an irrepressible social force – a French Falstaff, almost – still shines through. It is most evident in his handling of Roulin’s luxuriant beard, depicted with such a multiplicity of slashing, multidirectional lines that it seems possessed with a life of its own. A humble postman has been made to seem as boldly bearded, as heroically hirsute,  as Karl Marx himself.

Van Gogh did not only draw Roulin, he also painted him, and indeed went on to paint all the other members of the Roulin family besides. When he was younger, the painter had bought and collected British popular magazines, such as The Graphic, which contained numerous black-and-white illustrations of ordinary working people by artists such as Hubert Herkomer. Van Gogh had seen, in such work, a “noble calling”, namely the provision of “an art of the people, for the people”. His pictures of the Roulin family were, in part, his own attempt to create the same thing.

Reading van Gogh’s letters about Roulin, it might easily be imagined that their relationship was a bit of a one-way street. While the painter was busily projecting on to the postman all sorts of ideas about the common man and the revolutionary spirit, what did the postman make of him?

The evidence suggests that Roulin thought a great deal of van Gogh. A few months after the artist made this drawing, the painter Paul Gauguin came to stay. The pair argued, van Gogh became increasingly paranoid. The situation came to a head just before Christmas, when van Gogh theratened Gauguin with a cut-throat razor and subsequently cut off part of his own ear using the same implement, presenting it to one of the prostitutes in a local brothel as “a souvenir of me”. It was the postman Roulin who managed to get van Gogh home and put him to bed; and it was Roulin, too, who visited and consoled the troubled artist while he was recovering in the hospital at Arles during the following fortnight. The character of the man is captured in a letter that he wrote to the painter’s sister on 8 January 1889:

“Miss Van Gogh, I acknowledge receipt of your kind letter, by which you do me too much honour, and I make haste to answer you that your amiable brother Vincent has quite recovered; he left the asylum today, the 7^th inst. What caused my reply to be postponed for twenty-four hours is the fact that we kept each other company all day long, and I beg you to write him a letter. I have not read him your letter, for he would be too chagrined to know that he has caused you so much grief. When you write him, please do not let him know that you are informed of the causes of his distemper, and tell him that you have learned through the mediation of your brother in Paris  that he has been indisposed, and that you are very happy to hear that he has recovered… I do not think I deserve all the words of gratitude which you address to me, but I shall always do the utmost to deserve the esteem of my friend Vincent… I beg you, miss, to accept the sincere regards of the friend of your worthy brother Vincent.

Joseph Roulin, Post Office Agent, 10 Rue de la Montagne des Cordes, Arles sur Rhone”.