The Bedroom by Vincent van Gogh

The Bedroom by Vincent van Gogh

A room made of colour

Van Gogh painted his bedroom in the Yellow House at Arles in October 1888, shortly before Gauguin arrived to join him. The furniture is all here: the heavy yellow bed with two pillows and a scarlet coverlet, two rush-seated chairs, a small table with a jug and basin, a towel on a nail, a mirror, clothes hanging from a row of pegs. He left out the shadows and drew the outlines in dark paint, like the Japanese prints he admired, and wrote to his brother that the colour should suggest rest. The floor rises steeply and the far corner is askew, partly because the real room was not a true rectangle.

Faded walls and a flood

The walls look pale blue today, but they were painted violet: a red pigment in the mix has faded, leaving the blue behind. On the right-hand wall hang small versions of his portraits of two friends, Eugène Boch and Paul-Eugène Milliet. In early 1889, while Van Gogh was in hospital, the canvas was damaged when the Rhône flooded. That September he painted a full-size repeat, now in the Art Institute of Chicago, and a smaller one for his family, now in the Musée d’Orsay.

Where it hangs

This first version, painted in 1888, is in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and measures 72.4 by 91.3 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 9,000-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 60 inches on its longest side.

Sources: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam · Wikidata Q18713070 · Wikimedia Commons