Post-Impressionism

Bedroom in Arles

Van Gogh painted three nearly identical versions of his bedroom — one is in Amsterdam, one in Chicago and one in Paris, each with subtly different colors.

Vincent van Gogh · 1888

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Intro source: Wikipedia (EN)

Author

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

He flattened the perspective on purpose; the skewed walls and floor are not a mistake but his attempt to convey absolute rest and calm.

Highlights

Facts & legends

Van Gogh painted three nearly identical versions of his bedroom — one is in Amsterdam, one in Chicago and one in Paris, each with subtly different colors.
He flattened the perspective on purpose; the skewed walls and floor are not a mistake but his attempt to convey absolute rest and calm.
In letters to his brother Theo he described choosing each color to suggest sleep and repose — the walls were meant to soothe, not to be realistic.
He painted it while waiting for his friend Gauguin to move in, full of hope for an artists' community that soon collapsed.
The original was damaged by damp during a flood, which is partly why Van Gogh made the later repetitions.

Source: Wikipedia (EN)

More details Painted three times, nearly lost to a flood, faded from lilac to blue — Van Gogh's room of rest.

On the Canvas

A Room You Could Walk Into

The picture shows Van Gogh's own bedroom in the Yellow House on Place Lamartine in Arles. The canvas measures just 72 by 90 centimetres, yet the space reads as a real room you could step into. A bed with a bright blue cover and white pillows is pushed against the right-hand wall and seems to slide backward, tilted by a skewed perspective. Beside it stand two chairs, one straw-yellow, one with a woven green seat, and a small washstand holding a basin, a jug, a glass and a carafe.

The walls are painted a cool blue-violet, the door and shutters are green, and the floor is rust-red, laid in diagonal strokes that seem to run downhill toward the window on the far wall. Portraits and a landscape in narrow frames hang above the washstand and beside the bed — in the Amsterdam version a self-portrait and the portrait of an unknown young man; the Chicago and Paris versions swap in different pictures, one of the few ways to tell the three canvases apart at a glance. A striped towel hangs on a hook by the door, a plain mirror sits nearby, and a coat thrown over one chair is the only hint that someone actually lives here — the room itself stays empty of people. There are no shadows anywhere: the light is decorative rather than physical, laid down in flat patches like a Japanese print, which is exactly what makes the room feel slightly toy-like, its walls and floor tilting at angles that don't quite hold still.

How It Was Made

Two Days in Bed, Then a Flood

Van Gogh painted the first version in mid-October 1888, shortly after two days spent in bed, exhausted. Nobody had commissioned it — it was simply his own room in the house on Place Lamartine that he had been renting for months and hoped to turn into a studio for other painters. He worked fast, apparently in a sitting or two, laying the paint on thick and outlining the furniture in dark contour, deliberately stripping out volume and shadow: he wanted to build the room out of flat areas of colour rather than copy what the eye actually saw.

He described the idea to Theo on 16 October 1888, then sent much the same letter, with a small pen sketch of the composition, to Gauguin in Brittany. There were no models and no staging — the room is empty of any human figure, just objects. Then the canvas ran into real trouble. In the spring of 1889, while Van Gogh was recovering in the Arles hospital after a breakdown, the Yellow House flooded; water and saltpetre soaked the lower walls, and the painting, among others, was badly damaged, its paint starting to flake. Theo wanted to have it relined right away, but suggested Vincent first paint a copy rather than risk the fragile original. That is how, in early September 1889, a second version of the same size appeared in the asylum at Saint-Rémy, followed weeks later by a smaller third version, 57.5 by 74 centimetres, meant as a gift for his mother and his sister Wilhelmina.

Where the Images Come From

Prints Instead of Shadows

Van Gogh had been collecting Japanese ukiyo-e prints for years — dozens of sheets by Hiroshige and Hokusai — and carried their central lesson into his own painting: colour and line matter more than volume, shadow is optional, and space can be flattened for effect rather than for accuracy. The Bedroom is perhaps the purest result of that habit in all his Arles work; he himself described the room's effect in his letters as almost decorative, closer to a print than to an illusionistic view. By then he had spent a few years experimenting with pure colour, going back to his Paris period, when he watched Georges Seurat exhibit A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, a meticulous painting built dot by dot on the optical mixing of colour. Van Gogh never took to pointillism itself, finding it too cold and calculated for his temperament, but he took from it a taste for colour as a subject in its own right, not merely a way of filling in shapes.

That same autumn of 1888, only weeks before the Bedroom, he had painted a night scene on an Arles square — the picture that would become Café Terrace at Night — where he likewise banished ordinary black from the shadows and replaced it with deep blue and violet, working outdoors under the gas lamps. The Bedroom continues the same experiment in colour, only turned inward, away from a crowded night square and toward a small, almost intimate space of sleep and rest, which he described at length to both his brother and Gauguin as a picture meant to give the viewer's mind a rest.

The Painting's Fate

The Painting That Stayed in the Family

The first version never left Van Gogh's family and was never sold in his lifetime. After Theo died in 1891, it stayed with his widow, Johanna Bonger-van Gogh, who spent years managing her brother-in-law's estate and organising his early exhibitions, and then passed to their son, Vincent Willem van Gogh. In 1962 he transferred it, along with the rest of the family collection, to the newly founded Vincent van Gogh Foundation, which opened the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 1973 to house it — where it has remained on permanent loan ever since. Long before that, in 1889, the canvas had survived the flood and a relining that stopped the paint from flaking away for good.

The second version, painted at Saint-Rémy, passed through several private European collections before entering the Art Institute of Chicago in 1926 as part of the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection; it remains one of the museum's most visited paintings, still drawing a steady line of visitors. The smaller third version, the one Van Gogh sent as a gift to his mother and sister, also travelled through private hands in France before eventually joining the collection of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. All three canvases were shown together for the first time only in 2016, when the Art Institute of Chicago brought the Amsterdam and Paris versions to Chicago for a loan exhibition, alongside a life-size reconstruction of the room itself.

In Culture

Ten Dollars a Night Inside a Masterpiece

For that 2016 Chicago exhibition, the advertising agency Leo Burnett came up with an unusual stunt: they rented an ordinary apartment in the River North neighbourhood and spent a month turning one of its rooms into an exact copy of the Bedroom — blue walls, yellow chairs, a rust-red floor and a striped towel by the door — then listed it on Airbnb for ten dollars a night. So many people wanted to sleep inside the painting that the booking calendar filled up within hours of going live.

Part of the painting's fame now rests on the fact that it has literally changed colour over time: conservators at the Van Gogh Museum found that the soft lilac walls Van Gogh described in his letters as calming faded to today's cold blue because an unstable red lake pigment mixed with blue and white broke down under light, leaving a cross-section of the paint still pinkish-violet on the side that light never reached. In 2010 the room was rebuilt as an actual set for an episode of Doctor Who, in which Van Gogh himself walks through it. In 1992 Roy Lichtenstein reworked the same composition in his signature Pop style, calling the piece Bedroom at Arles and swapping Van Gogh's flat colour fields for a field of Ben-Day dots. Even people who have never set foot in a museum tend to recognise the room on sight — the tilted floor and blue walls have long since drifted free of the canvas itself, turning up in endless parodies where someone always tries to straighten the leaning walls, and in the constant references interior designers make to the idea of a small room, furnished with care and almost nothing else.

Official sources