Portrait of Armand Roulin

Armand Roulin, the eldest son of postman Joseph Roulin, was painted by Van Gogh multiple times in late 1888, and this Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen version — showing the young man in a vivid yellow jacket — is among the most chromatically forceful of the group. Van Gogh was fascinated by Armand's adolescent quality: the young man was seventeen or eighteen, at the precise threshold between boyhood and adulthood, and Van Gogh tried to capture that liminal transitional quality in the composition and colour. The Roulin family portraits as a whole constitute his most ambitious figurative project in Arles — Joseph, Augustine, Armand, and the youngest children Camille and Marcelle all served as models, creating a complete family portrait in the tradition of the Dutch group portrait but rooted in working-class southern French life. The yellow jacket against its contrasting background is one of his most deliberately engineered colour confrontations in the portrait genre.

The yellow jacket placed against a dark background creates a bold chromatic opposition that was deliberately engineered. The treatment of the jacket is bravura — loose and confident — while the face receives more careful, nuanced attention.