 And welcome to Barn's Takeout, your daily serving of art. My colleagues and I are going to be doing daily talks about some of our favorite works from the collection. So tune in every day on YouTube. We're going to be doing this every day until our building reopens. I'm talking to you right now from my house in Philadelphia. And we missed the collection and we think that this is a good way to visit it. And also it's just kind of nice to think about something other than all the craziness that's going on in the world right now. Today I'm going to be talking about Van Gogh's Postman painted in 1889. This was one of the first paintings that Albert Barns purchased. And it's really one of the icons of our collection. The reason that I chose this one today to talk about is that I'm a little bit obsessed with Van Gogh at the moment. And I have to confess that Van Gogh is not an artist that has always interested me. Which is kind of strange because my area of study as an art historian is late 19th century Europe. So to not have really looked closely at Van Gogh is kind of strange. But I think that it was that I had seen him so many times in reproduction that I just, I don't know, I just thought that there wasn't much to look at or something. But I think it was being at the barns and working in this collection where we've got this beautiful collection of Van Gogh's. There are seven. And being able to get up close to them and see the brushwork and just what an amazing painter he was. And to learn more about his life. I think he's one of the more interesting artists and obviously I'm not alone in thinking this. I'm just kind of a little bit late to the party. So he is one of those artists who has this incredible life story, you know, very sad one, but also sort of very romantic in that he he suffered for his art. He was the kind of quintessential Bohemian artist who gave up everything for his art. This picture in particular particular has such humanity to it, which which is another reason that I chose it. There to me it's a picture that's about human interaction. And yesterday I talked about another picture that was about human interaction and it was a Renoir showing people having lunch. Obviously, there is only one person in this painting and so the interaction that I'm talking about is is that between the painter and the sitter. It's one where you can really feel that connection between artist and subject you can really feel that Van Gogh is in the room and that and that there's there's just a sort of energy between them. The subject here so this man is named Joseph Roulin. He was a postman who lived in the town of oral in the south of France in the province region. And he had a job unloading the mail at the railway station in oral. He actually he lived near the train station as well as did Van Gogh. So they were neighbors and there was a cafe in the neighborhood called the cafe de la gare, which means the train station cafe. And it was kind of a CD place, but Van Gogh went there and he met Roulin and they became friends and drinking buddies and they had they had a lot in common they shared similar political views. They became very close, really close friends. Van Gogh became good friends with his with Roulin's whole family, his wife and children. And he painted all of them several times he painted the children he painted the wife he painted six portraits of Joseph Roulin the postman. And it was also Roulin who cared for Van Gogh after he had after that horrible incident where he caught off part of his ear. It was Roulin who who who called the police and and got him to the hospital and who checked in on him when he when he was at the hospital. And so it's very likely that one theory is that Van Gogh painted this for Roulin as a as a gift after he got out of the hospital in early 1889. We don't know that for sure, but there are there are there are a lot of reasons to that to that support this theory. Van Gogh had moved to Arles about a year before he painted this. He moved there from Paris. He had been in Paris for a couple of years. He was originally from the Netherlands, but he was in Paris trying to kind of become part of the avant-garde scene and he got he got tired of it. He got tired of city life. He wanted something more peaceful. He wanted the rural countryside. He wanted what he wanted sort of utopian existence and he had this fantasy that that Provence was going to be all of these things to him. And he also as a painter wanted to focus on country life. He wanted to paint rural landscapes and he wanted to paint the people of the countryside, the peasantry. So one of the things to think about when you're looking at this painting is how unusual it was for the time that Van Gogh was working to make a portrait that was just about that featured just a regular person. Portraiture had for centuries traditionally been reserved for the aristocracy for kings and queens and princes and, you know, sort of important people. And there had been artists before Van Gogh that kind of broke with that tradition, but it was still a pretty new thing to devote a canvas, to devote a portrait to just an ordinary person. And a, you know, a postal worker, it is a humble subject and for Van Gogh it was a proudly humble subject. His job, working at the post office is proudly announced on the hat. And just look at the way that he's, that Rulan is looking at you. He is not, you know, it's a humble subject, but he is certainly not shying away. He is confident. He is staring. He is meeting, meeting your gaze. But it's not confrontational. It's just kind of, it's kind of warm. And I think that when I think about this and kind of knowing about the relationship between Van Gogh and Rulan, I think about you can feel the friendship, you can feel the warmth in this, in this painting. So Van Gogh always, almost always worked directly from nature. He had to either repainting right in front of the landscape or working from a model. And his paintings are a very, like, really interesting, curious mix of what's observed, so a sort of realism or naturalism, and a total kind of liberty, inventiveness with color. That is not coming directly from what's observed. That's coming more from a place of emotion. And so one of the naturalistic details that I just love about this painting, and let's zoom in on it a little bit. I can show you these. It's just so amazing. Look at his mustache. Now, I know it's green, but when I'm talking about the naturalism, I'm talking about the fact that it is, it hangs over his lips, that it's untrimmed. That he is, he's not making an effort here to idealize Rulan. Also, look at his facial features. Look at the nose. It's a little bit lopsided. And the eyes are really lopsided. I mean, one is very noticeably lower than the other one. And I don't, I don't, who knows if that was really what he looked like. Maybe there was a little bit of asymmetry in the eyes. Maybe he's just exaggerating it. I kind of imagine that because of his concern with capturing this person, that there is some truth to the asymmetry in the eyes. But then at the same time that there are these naturalistic details, I mean, look at the way that he uses color in the beard here. This is supposed to be a salt and pepper beard. And it is just composed of so many different colors, bright blues and lavenders and greens. And somehow when you're looking at it, it all adds up to a salt and pepper. Maybe it's because that's kind of what we're expecting. But again, look at that mustache, the eyes. So Van Gogh was a spiritual person and he really admired the people of the countryside for their simplicity. He thought that this was the right way to live for people to be closer to the earth, to live natural and simple lives. And he wrote about how he thought that the people of Oral, people like Joseph Rula, they were sort of saintly. They were sort of religious figures in a way. And so when I look at this, I'm like, I've been thinking, wow, he really is making him into a sort of religious figure. The painting in the way that the sitter is arranged evokes Byzantine icons, you know, that up close depiction, the frontality, the total frontality, he's just directly facing the artist. The background, which might just be, you know, the pattern on the wallpaper, but it could also, it also sort of evokes this other worldliness. And then something that I learned recently, which is just, which I love so much, and this comes from my colleague at the Barnes. Her name is Kaylin Jewel, and she specializes in late classical art, and she knows a lot about Byzantine art. And she told me that, you know, we're going to go back to the asymmetry of the eyes for a second. She told me that in Byzantine art, it's something that you find every once in a while in Byzantine icons, that there's an asymmetry sometimes to the eyes, especially to the icons that were being produced in Constantinople in the sixth century. And the reason for that, the reason that they did that was it was for theological purposes to give a sense of humanity to Christ. But I just, I think that that's really interesting if he's making Roulin into a sort of religious figure. I mean, maybe it even goes down to that asymmetry of the eyes. Maybe that's what that asymmetry is about. Well, that's it for today. Thank you for listening, and I hope that you will join us again tomorrow.