AMSTERDAM (AP) — The Van Gogh museum is bringing a scattered household again collectively this fall to honor a postal employee, his spouse and their kids who sat as fashions for the Dutch grasp at at time when he was struggling to make pals in a French city.
Portraits of the expansively bearded postman Joseph Roulin, his spouse, two sons and child daughter have been introduced collectively for an exhibition titled “Van Gogh and the Roulins. Collectively Once more at Final.” The present collects work of the household from museums world wide and even options an armchair from the artist’s studio in Arles within the southern area of Provence.
The present is in Amsterdam after a run on the Museum of Superb Arts in Boston, which supplied one of many centerpieces of the exhibition, a portrait of the postman (he was truly a postal clerk) resplendent in his blue uniform with gold buttons and trim sitting in an armchair manufactured from native willow from Provence.
Whereas making ready the present, the Van Gogh Museum discovered the very chair featured within the portrait in its storerooms and is exhibiting it for the primary time. It was deemed too fragile to be despatched to Boston for the present there.
“As it turns out, we have this chair in our collection, but we have never shown it before,” said Van Gogh Museum Director Emilie Gordenker. “And it just shows you when you start to work on a topic — in this case, the Roulin family portraits — all kinds of things you might never have thought about before come up and it’s really exciting to rediscover, as it were, your own collection.”
Vincent van Gogh created a complete of 26 portraits of the household in a burst of artistic exercise from July 1888 to April 1889. There are 14 on present on the museum alongside works by his pal and fellow painter Paul Gauguin and by Dutch Golden Age masters Rembrandt van Rijn and Frans Hals, whose works have been main sources of inspiration.
“Many people consider his Arles period really his peak,” Gordenker stated. “I’m not sure we totally agree with that, but it is definitely a moment when he turns a corner … his power as an artist really comes out.”
In an upstairs room, the museum has created a life-size facade of the yellow home that Van Gogh used as his studio in Arles, the place Roulin turned greater than only a mannequin to Van Gogh.
“While Roulin isn’t exactly old enough to be like a father to me, all the same he has silent solemnities and tenderness for me like an old soldier would have for a young one,” the artist wrote in a letter to his brother, Theo, in April 1889.
Nienke Bakker, who curated the present together with Katie Hanson from the Boston Museum of Superb Arts, stated the Arles interval was essential to Van Gogh’s artistry.
“He literally says painting people brings out the best in me, but also makes me feel part of humanity. So it’s a very important thing,” Bakker stated.
She stated that the chair went into storage after Van Gogh left Arles and was then handed to the artist’s relations and in the end to the museum.
The museum is now displaying the chair alongside the portray from the Boston museum that options Roulin and the chair.
“It’s quite moving to have of course this fantastic portrait here, but also to to be able to show the actual chair he was sitting in and to realize that it was quite a simple small chair,” Bakker stated.
The exhibition opens Friday and runs by Jan. 11.
