The Bedroom
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About The Bedroom
If this room were a drawing handed in for class, you might circle a few things.
The bed seems to tilt. The chairs and table do not quite agree about where the floor goes. The back wall is crooked. Did Van Gogh get the room wrong?
Not so fast. Part of the real room was angled, and Van Gogh also chose to flatten the space and leave out most shadows. He was not trying to make a perfect diagram. He wanted strong colors and simple shapes to create a feeling of rest.
That is the strange challenge of this painting: the room looks lively, even slightly off balance, while its owner wanted it to feel calm. The bed, two chairs, pictures, and pillows tell us someone lives here, although no person appears.
Van Gogh painted this first version in 1888 in his Yellow House in Arles. Later versions exist, but this is where the experiment began: can a room look “wrong” and still feel true?
Artwork details
- Artist
- Vincent van Gogh
- Date
- Arles, October 1888
- Medium
- Oil on canvas; first version
- Dimensions
- 72.4 × 91.3 cm
- Collection
- Van Gogh Museum
- Accession number
- s0047V1962
Sources & rights
Vincent van Gogh, The Bedroom, 1888. Van Gogh Museum, s0047V1962. Image via Wikimedia Commons (Google Art Project), Public Domain.
