Vincent van Gogh | Vincent's Bedroom in Arles

About Vincent's Bedroom in Arles by Vincent van Gogh

Van Gogh painted his own bedroom in the Yellow House in October 1888, while recovering from several days of exhaustion. He was delighted with it and described it to Theo in detail, listing the colour of every object in the room and explaining that the whole picture was meant to suggest rest — that looking at it should rest the mind, or rather the imagination.

Everything is stated flatly and outlined: a bed, two chairs, a table with a jug and basin, a window, his own pictures on the wall. There are no shadows anywhere. He removed them deliberately, wanting the colour to carry the mood on its own without tonal modelling, in the manner of the Japanese prints he collected.

He made three versions. The first hangs in Amsterdam; a second, painted a year later in the asylum at Saint-Rémy, is in Chicago; a smaller third, made for his mother and sister, is in Paris. One detail is worth knowing: the walls read as pale blue now, but Van Gogh painted them violet. The red pigment he mixed in was fugitive and has faded away over 130 years, leaving only the blue behind.

Own a hand-painted Bedroom in Arles

This picture is built almost entirely from large areas of flat, unmodulated colour — a red floor, a yellow bed, blue walls — with no shading anywhere to disguise them. Flat colour is the hardest thing for a printing process to hold. Across a broad even area, ink laid down as a pattern of dots drifts and banding appears, so the surface that ought to sit perfectly still starts to shimmer and the calm Van Gogh was chasing leaks out of it. Brushed on by hand in oils, a flat plane stays genuinely flat and genuinely one colour, which is what makes the room restful in the first place.