Bedroom in Arles

Bedroom in Arles, which Van Gogh himself called simply The Bedroom, is an oil painting on canvas by Vincent van Gogh made in Arles in October 1888; this first version is in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation). It measures 72.4 × 91.3 cm.

The picture shows Van Gogh's own room in the Yellow House, which he furnished himself with simple pieces and hung with his own work. He began it in mid-October, after an illness had kept him in bed for days, and described it to his brother Theo in a letter with a sketch: the colour had to do the work and suggest rest or sleep; the walls pale violet, the floor red tiles, the bed and chairs fresh butter yellow, the blanket scarlet, the doors lilac. He removed shadows and painted in flat tints like Japanese prints, and he deliberately flattened the space. The odd angle of the back wall is not an error: the corner of the room really was skewed.

On the right wall hang small versions of his portraits of his friends Eugène Boch, The Poet, and Paul-Eugène Milliet, The Lover. Research has shown that the strong contrasts seen today are partly the result of discoloration: the walls and doors, now blue, were originally purple.

While Van Gogh was in hospital in Arles the canvas was damaged by flooding, and at the end of April 1889 he sent it to Theo. Theo suggested having it relined so that Vincent could copy it, and in September 1889 he painted a full-size repetition, now in the Art Institute of Chicago, followed by a smaller reduction for his mother and sister, now in the Musée d'Orsay. Looking back after his illness, he wrote that of all his canvases the bedroom seemed the best. The first version remained in the family and passed to the Vincent van Gogh Foundation in 1962. All three versions were shown together in Van Gogh's Bedrooms at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016.