THE POSTMAN ROULIN
By VINCENT VAN GOGH
"THE POSTMAN ROULIN" (32"/25.7" inches) oil on canvas, Painted by VINCENT VAN GOGH in 1888 (Arles). Now it is in Museum of Fine Arts , Boston.
VAN GOGH always drawn to people, made friends with Roulin, a postman in Arles, & painted him several times, as well as his wife & children.
VAN GOGH who loved his Socratic person, has described his candour, intelligence & enthusiasm, his "silent gravity and tenderness", "his voice has a strangely pure & touching quality in which there was for my ear at once a sweet & mournful cradle song & a kind of far away echo of the trumpet of revolutionary France."
The blue uniform sets the major tone of the portrait, but Roulin's official character cannot subdue his personal quality. In the end the blue becomes an attribute of the man, like his blue eyes (which are also like the gold buttons!).
The radiant face, fixed upon us like an icon, is perfectly fresh & unstylized, the broad beard is a landscape, an inverted forest with a profusion of yellows, greens & browns. The rigidity of the head is tempered by the quivering, raised features & the varied flesh tones.
The clumsy hands are awkwardly drawn, but the left remains natural and powerful. The large, almost shadowless, expanse of the blue uniform a difficult problem for a painter is paired in one kind of contrast with the light blue background, in another with the warm tones of the head & hands and its own gold buttons & braid, -& is converted into a most active, tangible envelopment of a real human body.
Attached to the precise reality of the clothes as a worn vestment, VAN GOGH traces its contours in vigorous black lines, which are applied witch discretion omitted at the shoulder & else where, thickened into shadow masses in places always irregular & responsive to the underlying body, varied like the surface they bound, with its of range warm & cool in the same blue.
Straightforward & simple as it looks, the paint ing is deeply contrived, with many unobtrusive repeats thymings of colours and shapes, the green of the beard & the table, the reds of the face & the lower left corner of the picture, the small characteristic angularities, the corner of the table, the lapels, the shirt front, the chair seat, etc.
& a challenge to the observer who wishes to understand as well as enjoy, the lightest tone of all, the triangle of white beneath the beard an unmistakably right and indispensable decision.
VINCENT VAN GOGH PAINTINGS.
LEARN MORE ABOUT VINCENT PLEASE VISIT WWW.ARTHISTORYACADEMY.BLOGSPOT.COM &FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK, TWITTER & INSTAGRAM.