Portrait of Joseph Roulin — The story behind it

The circumstances

Portrait of Joseph Roulin dates from 1889, in the Arles period. The Arles postman who stood by Vincent through the crisis, painted in the colours of the French flag.

What the date does not tell you is how quickly it happened. Vincent often worked at a single sitting and then reworked the surface for weeks; the 1889 on the front records when the picture was begun as often as when it was finished.

What came after

After Vincent's death the picture passed through Theo's estate and then through the hands of collectors who mostly wanted the name, not the painting. It is now at Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The market history is worth knowing because it distorts how we see the work. Prices from the 1980s and 1990s made Vincent into a brand, and the brand makes it hard to look at a picture like this one as a piece of work rather than an asset.

Provenance

MoMA collection. Provenance matters more than usual with Vincent, because so much of what circulates as his work is not his — early imitations, studio copies and outright forgeries all exist in numbers.

For a reproduction the provenance of the painting still matters, because it determines which file we print from. We name the collection on every product page for that reason.

Why the date is written as 'dated'

We say Portrait of Joseph Roulin is dated 1889 rather than completed in 1889, because Vincent reworked canvases for months and the date on a picture is often the date it was begun.

That distinction matters when you read catalogue entries. A painting dated 1889 may have been finished the following year, and a painting 'after' another may be a studio repetition Vincent made himself.

Portrait of Joseph Roulin is one of 43 pictures from the Arles years in this library. The palette runs to blue, orange, gold; the original is at Museum of Modern Art, New York. The largest reproduction we print is 60 × 90 cm, which is enough to read the composition and not enough to read every stroke — that is the honest trade a print makes.

Source note: catalogue data from the holding museum; quotations from Vincent van Gogh's correspondence; image files from open-access museum releases where available. Dated, not completed — see the note on dating in the article above.