A Small List of Great Artists – Vincent van Gogh’s Portraits of Roulin

Got to A Small List of Great Artists Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853-1890)
Got to Van Gogh’s Self Portraits

Vincent van Gogh had trouble hiring models, for monetary reasons, but also, I picture a man who was thoroughly unpleasant to be around, not “a people person” that townspeople are flocking to go up alone to his studio to spend lengthy chunks of time with him.

While Van Gogh was living in Arles from 1888-1889, he was primarily producing landscapes. But Joseph Roulin came to be a loyal and supportive friend, and not only wound up posing for multiple portraits, he also had his family – his wife as well as children ranging from four months to seventeen years – pose. Van Gogh painted every one of them at least twice, and then let them keep a painting of each family member, so that their home was a literal portrait gallery of modern art.

Joseph was 47 at the time, a working class man at the railroad station as an entreposeur des postes. (Warehouse shipping and receiving? Storage and inventory maintenence? Who can translate French??)

How These Portraits Began Shaping my Comic

In researching for my comic book project, Brush with Peril, stumbling onto these portraits was my first opportunity to begin realizing that often artists revisit subject matter, and work at it, over and over again. This first glimpse and realization of an artist’s series began to become very fascinating for me to see, as I then found it again and again – Van Gogh’s bedroom, Bacon’s Popes, Freud’s self-portraits, Degas’ ballet dancers, Monet’s water lilies or hay stacks or trains. It not only becomes fascinating to get a sense for what an artist was attempting, but also in using these images for my narrative story-telling comic book, in which a character could appear more than once to have a continuing narrative, and a new painting could be referenced each time, rather than either re-using the same image, or trying to come up with my own version of how a character or scene might appear and be consistent.

[Extra special thanks to www.art-vangogh.com, a fantastic website with an immense gallery of Van Gogh’s work as well as some great biographical info!]

[Also see a cool article about The Roulin Family at Wikipedia!]