Exhibition Review: “Van Gogh, The Roulin Family Portraits” at the MFA

In 1889, at St. Rémy asylum, seven months before he took his own life, Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo: “The rather superstitious idea they have here about painting sometimes depresses me more than I can tell you, because basically it is fairly true that a painter as a man is too absorbed in what his eyes see, and is not sufficiently master of the rest of his life.”

A truer statement can’t be found for any great artist. Picasso with his women, and Lucian Freud with the many children he spawned. Caravaggio, who killed Ranuccio Tommasoni. Vermeer and his debts. Goya, Rothko, Munch and Van Gogh, all suffering from mental illness. We can never know if that pressure helped fuel their art or diminish it. It is a myth that artists must suffer to create, as each of us suffers throughout our lives. That said, Van Gogh’s degree of suffering was particularly acute. He only painted for the last ten years of his short life, yet he produced 2,100 artworks (860 oil paintings)—most painted in the last two years of his life.

We are fortunate to have Van Gogh’s letters that outline both his struggles and joys. He relies on his brother for paints, canvases and even money for food, and always feels he is a burden. Still, he paints. He has seizures, is hospitalized numerous times, and still he paints. In his last year, he wrote, “To succeed, to have lasting prosperity, you must have a temperament different from mine; I shall never do what I might have done and ought to have wished and pursued.”

It is heartbreaking to read those missives and equally heartbreaking to see his paintings in museums, glowing with swirling energy and purpose while knowing how much he suffered and doubted. In his dynamic brush strokes, the strange combinations of color and the unusual compositions, you can feel the artist pushing himself hard, trying to “catch the real and essential.” He often had to fight dizziness, and his paintings are dizzying, as if he painted in a vortex, a force field of dire necessity. “Time does not return, but I am dead set on my work. I know the opportunities of working do not return. Especially in my case, in which a more violent attack may forever destroy my power to paint. During the attacks I feel a coward before the pain and suffering–more of a coward than I ought to be…”

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Yet there is no cowardice in his paintings now on view at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. “Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits” comprises twenty works by Van Gogh—the Roulin portraits, self-portraits and landscapes—as well as photographs, early Dutch art including a Rembrandt etching and engraving, Japanese woodblock prints and letters from Joseph Roulin to Van Gogh that illuminate the artist’s creative process. Curators Nienke Bakker of the Van Gogh Museum and Katie Hanson of the MFA have put together a deeply moving tribute to Van Gogh’s extraordinary mind in paint.

The exhibition has a tunneling aura. Some of the walls are deep purple, the rooms are dimly lit and each painting dazzles. The first works on view are the well-known The Yellow House (The Street) from 1988 and The Bedroom from 1989. The former is a view of the street where he lived in Arles, showing the house that contained his studio downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs, where Gauguin lived and worked beside Van Gogh for a period of time. The colors are delicious—the buttery yellow house canopied with a deep ultramarine and cobalt blue sky and the pink awning down the street capture the light of Arles that Van Gogh favored in his work. Gauguin wrote to a friend, “Oh yes! He loved yellow, did good Vincent, the painter from Holland, gleams of sunlight warming his soul, which detested fog. A craving for warmth.”

In Van Gogh’s portraits, he wanted to capture a ‘metaphysical magic’ in his subjects, and in Postman Joseph Roulin (1888), Roulin sits erect, earnest and noble, wearing his postman’s blue uniform and cap. “He has a Socratic head that’s interesting to paint,” Vincent wrote to Theo. Roulin was for Van Gogh like a big brother. In one week, Van Gogh painted five of the Roulin family that he loved so well: Roulin, his wife Augustine and their three children, with their “Russian look even though they are very French—common people like the peasants in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky novels.”

In several of these family portraits, the individuals are backdropped with a Matisse-like background of flowers. In Lullaby: Madame Augustine Roulin Rocking a Cradle (La Berceuse) from 1889, Augustine is surrounded by Van Gogh’s invented wallpaper of dahlias. He associated the flowers with his mother; he said they “sung a lullaby of color.” The show also has portraits of the two sons and three of the baby, Marcelle. In them all, it is the eyes that captivate, as well as the thick vigor of paint. Sometimes the flesh of the person reflects the color of the background, as in Camille Roulin (1888).

Two landscapes are especially captivating. Ravine (1889) is reminiscent of Van Gogh’s last painting, Tree Roots (not in the show). In both, rocks, water, and roots are in furious movement as if time was of the essence, rushing furiously. Enclosed Field with Ploughman, 1889, with its tiny windmill against a pale sky and furrowed wheat fields with a man and his donkey, is a tender tribute to a laboring farmer. “I can see myself in the future when I shall have some success, regretting my solitude and wretchedness here, when I saw the reaper in the field below between the iron bars of the cell. Misfortune is good for something.”

Raising of Lazarus (after Rembrandt) from 1890 is similarly poignant. The yearning in the woman, Lazarus barely corporal, the spiraling sun, the hills of Arles in the background, the deep green and surrounding pale yellows, all seem to portend Van Gogh’s suicide a mere two months later. Equally moving are the exhibition’s three self-portraits, all remarkably different, illustrating his mercurial states of mind.

Overall, “The Roulin Family Portraits” highlights Van Gogh’s furious attempt to paint despite his deep sorrow and “unbearable hallucinations.” The show presents the last two years of his life, a deeply troubling time, in bold relief. He wrote in his last year, “I am now trying to recover like a man who meant to commit suicide and, finding the water too cold, tries to regain the bank.” He was only 37 when the joy he took in painting could no longer sustain him.

“Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits” is on view through September 7, 2025, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.