The Bedroom
Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890) · October 1888
Here is Vincent's own room on the first floor of the Yellow House in Arles, painted in October 1888 while he waited for Gauguin to arrive. A wooden bed with a red cover, two rush chairs, a small table with a jug and basin, his own portraits and a landscape on the walls, a towel on a peg and a window with the shutters half closed. It is a simple room and he wanted the painting to feel simple too. He wrote to Theo that it should express rest, or sleep in general, and that looking at it should rest the mind, or rather the imagination.
The colours do the work. Vincent chose flat areas of pale violet for the walls, a butter yellow for the bed and chairs, scarlet for the blanket, and a green window, with almost no shading, so that the picture reads like a Japanese print. Notice how the floor tilts up and the walls lean in. Part of that is deliberate, since he wanted the objects to sit boldly on the surface, but part of it is true to the house, whose back wall really did run at an angle. The paint is thinner than in the sunflowers, brushed quickly in broad strokes, and you can see the canvas weave through the floor.
The painting was damaged by damp during Vincent's hospital stay in 1889, and he later painted two smaller copies, now in Chicago and Paris, so that the composition would survive. This first version is the one with the warmest, most spontaneous surface. When the museum restored it, they found that the walls were originally a clear violet blue and the door a lilac, rather than the faded blue we see now, because the red pigment in the mixture has slowly disappeared. Stand back and imagine the room a little pinker, and it comes closer to what Vincent saw.
Did You Know? Vincent painted this picture with the shutters half closed because he was recovering from exhaustion and had spent nearly two days in that bed before picking up the brush.
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