From March 30 until September 7, 2025 in partnership with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston shows the exhibition Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits, the first show devoted to the artist’s friendship with the postman Joseph Roulin, his wife Augustine, and their three children: Armand, Camille, and Marcelle.
The two museums had already collaborated for the 2000 exhibition Van Gogh: Face to Face — the Portraits, shown in Boston, Detroit and Phildadelphia, which had featured an important number of the Roulin family portraits.
During his stay in Arles in 1888 and 1889, Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) created a total of 26 portraits of the postman’s working class family. The current MFA Boston exhibition is featuring 23 works by Van Gogh—including 14 of the Roulin family portraits—as well as earlier Dutch art and Japanese woodblock prints that inspired the artist.
In addition to iconic works from the MFA’s collection, the show includes more than 20 key loans from prominent international collections. Furthermore, the exhibition presents 10 letters from Joseph Roulin to Van Gogh and the artist’s siblings together for the first time, offering an intimate look at their friendship.
As a detail, let’s mention that, for the Boston show, the materials in almost thirty of the nearly two hundred paintings Vincent Van Gogh made while living in Arles have been studied.
The exhibition is co-curated by Katie Hanson, William and Ann Elfers Curator of Paintings, Art of Europe, at the MFA in Boston and Nienke Bakker, Senior Curator at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
The catalogue, edited by Nienke Bakker and Katie Hanson, offers essays written by 10 specialists offering new insights, reproductions of Roulin’s letters as well as of all works exhibited: Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits. MFA Publications, April 2025, English, 232 pages, 21.59 x 2.03 x 25.4 cm. ISBN-10 : 0878469036. ISBN-13: 978-0878469031. Accept cookies — we receive a commission; price unchanged — and order the English catalogue from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de.
Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. March 30, 2025 to September 7, 2025. Ann and Graham Gund Gallery. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
The exhibition is organized in thematic sections. The first, “Sense of Place: The Yellow House in Arles,” provides an immersive look at Arles, where the artist lived from February 1888 to April 1889, and the dwelling he rented in May 1888 to use first as a studio and then as a home. An 1887 self-portrait, completed in Paris as Van Gogh was making plans to move south, radiates the ambition and enthusiasm of the painter as he envisioned a new life in Arles. A map of the town orients visitors along with The Yellow House (The Street) (1888), the artist’s colorful depiction of his home and studio where the Roulin family posed for their portraits. A schematic construction of Van Gogh’s studio within this first gallery provides a sense of scale for visitors of the cozy space in which the artist worked.
Although Van Gogh thought it would be easier to find models and make contacts in Arles than in Paris, even after four months whole days went by without him exchanging a word with anyone. In summer 1888, Van Gogh and Joseph Roulin shared drinks at a café and a deep friendship began—and with it, the opportunity for Van Gogh to practice painting people, something he thought brought out the best in him. And indeed, he created his Arles portraits at the peak of his artistic abilities, while he was collaborating with Paul Gauguin, with the ambition to create colorful portraits with a grand, universal meaning, through which he hoped to contribute to the art of the future.
“The Postman and Portrait Practice,” a section dedicated to Van Gogh’s best friend in Arles. According to Marie Ginoux, who owned the café where the two men often met, they were like brothers. This section includes the artist’s earliest depiction of the postman, the oil painting Postman Joseph Roulin (1888), which belongs to the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In addition to two drawings of Roulin, this second section also features portraits by 17th-century Dutch artists from which Vincent Van Gogh drew inspiration, including works by Merry Drinker (about 1628–30), by Frans Hals (1582/83–1666), Portrait of a Family in an Interior (1654) by Adriaen van Ostade (1610–1684), as well as lithographs by the French painter, sculptor and printmaker Honoré Daumier (French, 1808–1879), famous for his caricatures and cartoons made for newspaper and periodicals.
Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. March 30, 2025 to September 7, 2025. Ann and Graham Gund Gallery. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
After completing his first painting of Joseph Roulin in summer 1888, Vincent van Gogh would go on to create a suite of 26 portraits of the five Roulin family members by April 1889. The artist made eight portraits of Augustine, two of them with the infant Marcelle, and three solo portraits each of Armand, Camille, and Marcelle.
In the third section, “The Roulin Family”, the entire family is portrayed across four canvases encircling the visitor. A large series of works devoted to the members of a single working-class family is unique not only in Van Gogh’s oeuvre, but also highly unusual in the history of art. According to Nienke Bakker and Katie Hanson, while a portrait painter would pay several visits to sitters of imperial or royal blood, depicting the various members of a seemingly random working-class family with such frequency and concentration was otherwise unknown in the nineteenth century. Van Gogh considered them more interesting than any royal or aristocratic family. In addition, he demonstrated that the same person supplies material for very diverse portraits.
Van Gogh’s Roulin family portraits were a creative amalgamation of close observation of his beloved friends and of other sources of inspiration. The exhibition section “Creating Community through Art” highlights Van Gogh’s artistic influences, from Japanese printmakers such as Toyohara Kunichika and Utagawa Kunisada to Dutch artists including Frans Hals the Elder (1582-1666) and Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669). For details, read the catalogue essay “Van Gogh, Rembrandt and Frans Hals” by Christopher D. M. Atkins.
In addition in this section, the curators situate Van Gogh within the artistic community of his time, featuring works by artist friends Émile Bernard (1868–1941) and Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), the latter of whom shared his Yellow House in Arles for two months in late 1888.
After an argument with Gauguin in December 1888, Van Gogh cut his left ear and was hospitalized. Joseph Roulin visited the artist in the hospital and wrote several letters to Van Gogh’s family, updating them on his condition. Roulin also wrote to Van Gogh for months after the artist pursued residential care in the psychiatric hospital at Saint-Rémy. “Letters from the Postman” presents 10 of these letters, offering an intimate look at the relationship between the artist and his friend.
Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. March 30, 2025 to September 7, 2025. Ann and Graham Gund Gallery. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
The section “Observation and Inspiration” explores how Vincent Van Gogh found great potential for art in the people and places around him—starting with what he saw and modifying it to bring forth profound depth of feeling. In addition to the dedicated portraits of Augustine Roulin, Van Gogh included her features in other paintings including The Dance Hall in Arles (1888) and The Raising of Lazarus (after Rembrandt) (1890). A similar combination of vision and imagination characterizes the landscapes Ravine (1889) and Enclosed Field with Ploughman (1889) from the MFA’s collection that Van Gogh painted in Saint-Rémy.
In the final section, “Enduring Legacy: Beyond Arles,” the exhibition comes full circle – ending as it began, with the artist’s own image and a cherished place. Here, visitors encounter Self-Portrait (1889) and The Bedroom (1889), both painted in autumn 1889 in the hospital of Saint-Paul de Mausole in nearby Saint-Rémy, as Van Gogh reminisced about his time in Arles a year prior when he focused on the portraits of the Roulin family. Photographs of the Roulins, taken later in their lives, are featured, allowing visitors to see the individuals behind the portraits. The exhibition—and this section especially—explores how the Roulin family, and Van Gogh himself, were immortalized through his art.
The exit foyer of the exhibition serves as a community space for visitors to write and color postcards of the MFA’s Postman and enjoy reading a children’s book and the exhibition’s catalogue. Visitors can also learn more about Van Gogh’s techniques with tactile 3-D prints of detail areas from Van Gogh’s Lullaby: Madame Augustine Roulin Rocking a Cradle (La Berceuse). MFA conservators partnered with Canon Production Printing Canada Inc. and Canon Production Printing Netherlands B.V. to generate the prints, using photogrammetry to create a digital 3-D model of areas from the painting.
The curators focus on the human story, help us to slow down, look closely, and feel deeply with these paintings made at a pivotal moment in Van Gogh’s life and career. This exhibition touches on broad themes—such as how we communicate, how we care for ourselves and for others, how we build bonds, both in terms of families and friendships, and how we see ourselves and those around us. According to the curators, these themes resonate with us after the covid-pandemic. It is a story of resilience—although I would add that it ended badly with Van Gogh’s suicide—and of the tender bonds that bring life greater meaning through connection.
The catalogue, edited by Nienke Bakker and Katie Hanson, offers essays written by 10 specialists offering new insights, based on archival material, contemporary criticism, and technical studies. In addition, the catalogue features reproductions of Roulin’s letters and of all works exhibited in Boston.
Edited by Nienke Bakker and Katie Hanson: Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits. MFA Publications, April 2025, English, 232 pages, 21.59 x 2.03 x 25.4 cm. ISBN-10 : 0878469036. ISBN-13: 978-0878469031. Accept cookies — we receive a commission; price unchanged — and order the English catalogue from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de.
This exhibition and catalogue review is based on the book Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits. For a better reading, quotations and partial quotations in this review are not put between quotation marks.
Exhibition and catalogue review added on May 1, 2025 at 21:22 Swiss time.
