The Schoolboy

Van Gogh painted this portrait of a young boy — identified as Camille Roulin, the eleven-year-old son of his friend the postman Joseph Roulin — in early 1889 in Arles. The Roulin family as a whole was Van Gogh's most painted circle of sitters, and Camille appears in several works. Van Gogh was drawn to children as portrait subjects partly because he could not otherwise afford models, but also because he found their unguarded directness compelling. The deliberate simplicity of the schoolboy's posture and uniform connects to his stated ambition to paint working-class family life as a modern equivalent of the Dutch Masters' group portraits.

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.