The Bedroom

1889

Oil on canvas, 73.6 × 92.3 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago

A narrow room holds a wooden bed, two chairs and pictures on the walls. This canvas is the second of three versions he painted.

Flat, bold colors and simple shapes were meant to calm the eye. Yet the steep, rushing lines of floor and bed can read as restless, a tension the museum notes.
A letter lists the colors: lilac walls, chrome yellow bed, blood-red bedspread, green window.
Thick, broken brushwork stays visible across the floorboards.
It was first exhibited at Ambroise Vollard's Paris gallery in 1895.
Frederic Clay Bartlett bought it in 1926 and gave it to the museum that year.

The room was his own, in the Yellow House in Arles, first painted in October 1888. At Saint-Rémy he repainted it, adding a smaller copy for his mother and sister.

Image: The Art Institute of Chicago · CC0