The Schoolboy

Camille Roulin, the eleven-year-old son of Van Gogh's friend the postman Joseph Roulin, was painted by Van Gogh in early 1889 at Arles in what has become known as The Schoolboy — part of the comprehensive Roulin family portrait series. Van Gogh painted all five members of the Roulin family during his Arles period, treating them as a working-class group portrait in the tradition he associated with Hals's civic guards and Rembrandt's family groups. He was drawn to Camille's directness — children's unguarded gaze appealed to his commitment to painting faces without psychological manipulation — and to the symbolic simplicity of the schoolboy's situation: a child at the beginning of his formation, not yet shaped by adult hardship. The São Paulo Museum of Art holds this as part of a remarkable collection of European nineteenth-century painting assembled in Brazil, where wealthy coffee planters of the late nineteenth century imported European art with unusual enthusiasm.

The sitter's jacket is rendered in vivid blue against an orange-gold background, a complementary contrast Van Gogh used repeatedly in his Arles portraits. The face is carefully modelled with warm ochres and reds. The handling is direct and confident, with little revision visible in the paint surface.