Van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles
Van Gogh painted his bedroom in the Yellow House at Arles three times, and the three versions now hang in Amsterdam, Chicago and Paris.
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About the series
He painted the first in October 1888, after weeks of hard work, as a picture of rest. In a letter to Theo he listed the colours: lilac walls, a red blanket, yellow furniture, and colour that should suggest rest or sleep. He drew the room in flat, simple shapes, like a Japanese print. The slanting back wall is not a mistake: the room really was an awkward shape.
While he was in hospital the next year, the first canvas was damaged by damp after flooding in Arles. In September 1889, at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, he painted a copy at the same size, now in the Art Institute of Chicago, and a smaller one for his mother and sister, now in the Musée d'Orsay. The first is in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
The three are close but not the same: the colours of the walls and floor shift, and the portraits on the wall change in the third. Any of them suits a bedroom, the room it was painted for.
