A postman, his family, and a chair: Van Gogh museum's reunion exhibition

The Van Gogh museum is bringing a scattered family back together this fall to honour a postal worker, his wife and their children who sat as models for the Dutch master at at time when he was struggling to make friends in a French town.

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Portraits of the expansively bearded postman Joseph Roulin, his wife, two sons and baby daughter have been brought together for an exhibition titled “Van Gogh and the Roulins. Together Again at Last.” The show collects paintings of the family from museums around the world and even features an armchair from the artist's studio in Arles in the southern region of Provence.

The show is in Amsterdam after a run at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which provided one of the centerpieces of the exhibition, a portrait of the postman (he was actually a postal clerk) resplendent in his blue uniform with gold buttons and trim sitting in an armchair made of local willow from Provence. While preparing the show, the Van Gogh Museum found the very chair featured in the portrait in its storerooms and is exhibiting it for the first time. It was deemed too fragile to be sent to Boston for the show there.

“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. “And 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 and it's really exciting to rediscover, as it were, your own collection.”