Porträt des Joseph Roulin

Joseph Roulin sorted and carried the mail at the Arles railway station, and in the lonely months of 1888 he became one of Van Gogh's few real friends in the town. Van Gogh painted him again and again, some six times over the year, and painted his wife and children too, as if trying to keep a whole family close on canvas. Here Roulin sits square in the blue uniform he wore with obvious pride, the cap lettered for the postal service, his great forked beard spreading over the coat. Van Gogh set him against a plain ground so nothing pulls away from the face. He made this one late in the year, around the breakdown that December which sent him to the hospital at Arles.