Van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles
Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890) · 1889
A small bedroom with a wooden bed, two rush chairs, a washstand and a few pictures on the wall. It is Van Gogh's own room in the Yellow House at Arles, the home where he hoped to found a community of artists in the south. The floor tilts up towards you, the walls lean, the window is shut and the door on the left leads to the room he was preparing for Gauguin. Everything is plain, and that plainness was the point. Van Gogh wrote that he wanted the picture to express absolute rest, and that looking at it should rest the mind, or rather the imagination.
He chose the colours to do that work. The walls are pale violet, the floor red, the bed and chairs the yellow of fresh butter, the bedcover scarlet, the blanket green. There are almost no shadows, and the forms are outlined in dark contour like a Japanese print, which Van Gogh admired for exactly this flat calm. The perspective looks wrong, but the room really was oddly shaped, with a rear wall set at an angle, and Van Gogh exaggerated it. Look at the two pillows and two chairs, doubled like a wish for company, and at the small portraits on the wall, which change between the versions of the picture.
Van Gogh painted the bedroom three times. The first, from October 1888, is in Amsterdam; a second copy is in Chicago. This is the third, a smaller version painted in September 1889 at the asylum of Saint-Rémy for his mother and sister, and the pictures on the wall include a self-portrait. The bright reds and violets have faded since, so the room is quieter than he intended. The painting was acquired by the French state in 1959 and is one of the works that draws the biggest crowds on this level.
Did You Know? The Yellow House was badly damaged by bombing in 1944 and later demolished, so this painting is one of the few records of the room inside it.
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