The Bedroom
Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890) · 1889
A simple room with a wooden bed, two rush chairs, a small table with a jug and basin, and pictures on the wall, painted in flat slabs of yellow, blue, red and green. It is Van Gogh's own bedroom in the Yellow House at Arles in the south of France, the home where he hoped to found a community of artists. He painted the subject three times. This is the second version, made in September 1889 while he was a patient at the asylum of Saint Rémy, copying the first picture, which had been damaged by damp, so that his family in Holland could have one.
Van Gogh told his brother Theo that he wanted the picture to express rest, and that the flat colours and heavy outlines were meant to suggest calm, like a Japanese print. Yet the room tilts. The floor rushes up, the far wall slants, and the two chairs seem to lean away from each other. Part of the distortion is real, because the room in the Yellow House had an odd shape, and part is Van Gogh's exaggeration. Look at the two portraits on the wall, which in this version are small self portraits and pictures of friends, and at the thick paint of the floorboards, applied so fast that the strokes still stand up in ridges.
The Yellow House was ruined by bombing in 1944, so the paintings are all that remain of it. This version came to Chicago in 1926 through the bequest of Helen Birch Bartlett, part of the same collection that brought the Grande Jatte. The first version is in Amsterdam and the third, smaller one is in Paris, and the three were reunited in Chicago for an exhibition in 2016. A memorable detail is the pair of pillows on the bed, plumped and ready, in a room where the painter himself would never sleep again.
Did You Know? Van Gogh painted the room three times; the Chicago version was made from memory in the asylum at Saint Rémy because the original had been damaged by a flood.
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