After Van Gogh, Armand Roulin
17x13
by Kim Blair
oil on canvas
After Van Gogh, Armand Roulin
17x13
beginning drawing in black oil paint of my copy
One of the reasons (as many of you may already know) that I have been posting less often for the past couple of years is that I am taking classes at the University, so I need to conserve my painting time for mostly homework and assignments.
Our final assignment for the painting class this term was to copy an Old Master, so of course I chose Van Gogh... I know many of you are not surprised by my choice of artist but you might be interested to see that I chose to copy one of his Portraits (well actually I did two, but the other one I will post at a later date) rather than his sunflowers.
Van Gogh had a love of portraiture... 'modern portraiture' as he called it, and he wanted to capture the 'essence' of the sitter before him rather than a perfect likeness.
Armand is the sixteen year old son of the postman Joseph Roulin ( Joseph's portrait with his heavy beard posed in his dark blue 'Postes' uniform is one of the more famous portraits by Van Gogh.)
Vincent chose to paint a portrait of each of the five Roulin family members using different colors and various poses in order to portray each individual within the family unit. Always the fast painter, he completed the portraits during a fews days near the beginning of December in 1888.
One little tid-bit of information from the book I used for my research (Van Gogh Face to Face) said that the Roulins were a poor family when compared to Van Gogh. Joseph Roulin housed and fed a wife and three children on 135 francs a month, while Theo sent Vincent 250 francs a month to live on (Theo paid for and sent Vincent's paints and supplies on top of this amount.) Vincent, a single man found it difficult to serve on 250 francs a month!
*I wonder what the equivalent of 250 francs would be today... anyone know?
NFS