Rediscovering Van Gogh’s Roulin portraits and the iconic armchair

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is bringing together a family long scattered across museums worldwide this fall to honour a postal worker, his wife, and their children, who modelled for the Dutch master at a time when he struggled to find friends in a French town.

Portraits from the late 1880s depicting the bearded postman Joseph Roulin, his wife, two sons, and a baby daughter form the heart of an exhibition titled Van Gogh and the Roulins. Together Again at Last. The show gathers works from international collections and even features an armchair from Van Gogh’s studio in Arles, southern Provence.

Van Gogh’s Arles period shines through Roulin family reunion

Before arriving in Amsterdam, the exhibition ran at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which lent a portrait of Roulin, resplendent in his blue uniform with gold buttons, seated in a locally made willow chair. While preparing the Amsterdam show, museum curators rediscovered the very chair depicted in the painting, previously kept in storerooms due to its fragility. “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. “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. It’s really exciting to rediscover, as it were, your own collection.”

Van Gogh created 26 portraits of the Roulin family between July 1888 and April 1889 in a remarkable burst of creativity. Fourteen of these are on display alongside works by his friend and fellow painter Paul Gauguin, as well as Dutch Golden Age masters Rembrandt van Rijn and Frans Hals, whose work was a major influence on Van Gogh.

“Many people consider his Arles period really his peak,” said Gordenker. “I’m not sure we totally agree, but it is definitely a moment when he turns a corner… his power as an artist really comes out.”

In an upstairs gallery, the museum has recreated a life-size façade of the yellow house Van Gogh used as his studio in Arles. Here, Roulin transcended the role of model, becoming a source of quiet support. “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,” Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in April 1889.

Nienke Bakker, co-curator with Katie Hanson from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, emphasised the significance of this period. “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 said.

The armchair, which had gone into storage after Van Gogh left Arles and passed through family hands before joining the museum’s collection, is now displayed beside the Boston portrait of Roulin seated upon it. “It’s quite moving to see this fantastic portrait here, but also to be able to show the actual chair he was sitting in and to realise it was quite a simple, small chair,” Bakker added.

The exhibition offers visitors not just a visual reunion of the Roulin family, but also an intimate glimpse into Van Gogh’s relationships and creative process. By bringing together these portraits and artefacts, the museum highlights the human side of the artist — his connections, inspirations, and the quiet moments that shaped his Arles period.

Van Gogh and the Roulins. Together Again at Last opens on Friday and runs through 11 January.

For more updates, join/follow our WhatsApp, Telegram, and YouTube channels.