Van Gogh's Postman: A Portrait of Joseph Roulin, 1889

Van Gogh's Postman: A Portrait of Joseph Roulin
Oil on canvas, 1889
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This painting is from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. It is great that you can go right up to famous canvases like this and use your camera. The only restriction that I know of is using your flash, but that is pretty much a given at any museum. There are a couple of areas that you can’t use your camera, usually the photography collection (which BTW is pretty amazing) and some of the newer exhibits.

Since this blog uses a lot of flower pictures and the winter has been very long the supply of new photos I have is dwindling. When I was at work on Tuesday there were some signs of life out in the garden, like some Crocus, Dwarf Iris and a lot of swelling buds so I feel like I just have to make it a week or two before there will be enough flowers out to get some new images. Our area is recovering from several bad storms including the one last weekend that had several inches of rain and winds as high a 75mph. There are a lot of people still out of power in the lower part of our county and driving around is an adventure a there are still trees blocking the roads, bring your chainsaw if you want to get groceries. Lucky the gardens we visited had relatively minor damage, just a couple of trees blown over but they were small. We will be picking up little sticks for a long time though.


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So back to the Van Gogh painting. This painting is part of the famous series of six paintings and to 2 drawings that van Gogh made in Arles, France in a eight-month period in 1888 and 1889. It was a critical juncture of the artist’s career and Joseph Roulin became a sort of brother to the artist during the time that mental illness started to affect Van Gogh. Someone with an Art History education could probably explain this better than I have and most of this information is well documented on the net so if you want to learn more bout the postman series you can find some of it here:
MoMa.org