Van Gogh Bedroom in Arles: Complete Guide — Three Versions, the Colour Programme Decoded, and the Recursive Installation

Last updated: May 2026 · By Stanislav Arnautov · Berlin

Vincent van Gogh (Zundert, 1853 – Auvers-sur-Oise, 1890) painted the first version of the Bedroom in Arles (La Chambre à Arles) in October 1888, when he had been living in the Yellow House at 2 Place Lamartine, Arles, for approximately eight months. The painting is oil on canvas, 72 × 90 cm, and is held at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Van Gogh painted three versions of the bedroom subject: October 1888 (Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam, 72 × 90 cm), September 1889 (Art Institute of Chicago, 73.6 × 92.3 cm), and September 1889 (Musée d'Orsay Paris, 57.5 × 74 cm). The painting is unique in Van Gogh's oeuvre as the only major work he made to document his own domestic space — not a landscape, not a portrait, not a commission, but his own bedroom, painted because he wanted to record what his home looked like and what it meant to have one. DeckArts reproduces the Bedroom in Arles on Grade-A Canadian maple from approximately $140, shipping from Berlin.

Three Versions: Which Is Which

The three versions were made 11 months apart: the original in Arles in October 1888, and both copies in Saint-Rémy in September 1889, after Van Gogh had been in the asylum for four months. The copies were made from memory — Van Gogh did not have the original with him at Saint-Rémy (it had been sent to Theo in Paris) and reconstructed the composition from his recollection of the room. Comparison of the three versions by the Van Gogh Museum's technical team has identified minor compositional differences between the original and the copies, consistent with reconstruction from memory rather than from a small preparatory sketch or photograph.

The Colour Programme: What Van Gogh Said Each Colour Meant

Van Gogh wrote to Theo about the bedroom painting in October 1888 with unusual explicitness about the colour programme. The letter (Letter 705, 16 October 1888) is the most detailed account Van Gogh ever gave of a single work's intended meaning. Key passages:

"The colour is to do the job here, and by being simplified by giving a style to objects, it is to suggest rest or sleep in general. In short, looking at the picture ought to rest the brain, or rather, the imagination."

"The walls are pale violet. The floor is red tiles. The wood of the bed and the chairs is the yellow of fresh butter, the sheets and pillows very bright lemon yellow. The blanket scarlet. The window green. The toilet table orange, the basin blue. The doors lilac."

This colour description is a complete chromatic programme: every surface in the room is assigned a specific colour with a specific psychological function. The pale violet walls create a calming, slightly dissociated ground. The warm yellow furniture creates warmth against the cool violet. The lemon-yellow bedding provides the brightest, lightest tone. The scarlet blanket provides the warmest, most saturated colour. The green window connects to the outside world through the complementary colour of red (the red tile floor's complement). The blue basin and orange toilet table are complementary pairs that vibrate against each other at the scale of small objects.

The colour programme is not accidental or documentary — Van Gogh was not painting the bedroom as it happened to look but as he wanted it to look. He had specifically chosen the furniture colours, the bedding, and the object placement to create the specific colour relationships he wanted. The bedroom painting is therefore both a documentary record and a designed programme: it records the room Van Gogh designed for himself, painted in the colours he chose deliberately for their psychological effects.

The Yellow House: Van Gogh's First Home

Van Gogh arrived in Arles in February 1888, renting rooms at a local inn before signing the lease on the Yellow House (2 Place Lamartine, Arles) in May 1888. The Yellow House — named for its ochre-yellow painted exterior — was the first property Van Gogh had ever rented as his own home; he had previously lived in rented rooms always as a lodger in someone else's household. The significance of having his own space — four rooms, the ability to choose his furniture, paint his walls as he wanted, receive guests — was enormous for Van Gogh, who had spent his adult life in temporary lodgings and other people's houses.

Van Gogh furnished the Yellow House gradually from May to October 1888, purchasing the iron bed, the yellow chairs, the toilet stand, and the other objects depicted in the Bedroom painting. He painted the walls himself. He hung Japanese prints on the walls of the public rooms (several are visible in his painting of the guest room). By October 1888, when he painted the Bedroom, the room was the most designed and most personal domestic space he had ever occupied. The painting was made to record this achievement — to document that he had, at 35, finally achieved the specific form of stability that a room of one's own represents.

The Yellow House no longer exists. It was damaged in the Allied bombing of Arles on 25 June 1944 and subsequently demolished. The site at 2 Place Lamartine is currently occupied by a modern building; a small marker commemorates Van Gogh's occupancy. The room depicted in the Bedroom painting is reconstructed in the exhibition at the Espace Van Gogh (the former hospital where Van Gogh was treated after the ear incident) in Arles, based on the three versions of the Bedroom painting and Van Gogh's detailed letters about the room's contents and colours.

The Tilted Perspective: Why the Room Looks Wrong

The Bedroom in Arles has a distinctive visual quality that most viewers notice immediately: the perspective looks wrong. The floor tilts sharply toward the viewer; the walls seem to converge at unusual angles; the furniture appears to be simultaneously too large and too close to the viewer. This perspective distortion has been the subject of sustained art historical attention since at least the early 20th century.

The most widely accepted explanation is that the Yellow House's actual bedroom was an unusual trapezoidal shape — not a standard rectangular room but a room with non-parallel walls created by the building's position at the corner of two streets (Place Lamartine and rue de la Cavalerie). The room's actual walls converged at an angle that was not the standard 90 degrees of a rectangular room, creating the specific perspective distortion that Van Gogh documented. Floor plan analysis of the Yellow House, based on Arles city records and Van Gogh's own drawings of the building's layout, has confirmed this non-rectangular shape.

A secondary explanation — not mutually exclusive with the first — is that Van Gogh was deliberately amplifying the spatial distortion for expressive purposes, making the room feel simultaneously larger and more enclosed than it actually was, and creating the slightly vertiginous quality that a room depicted from a high viewpoint with an acute perspective can produce. The specific combination of the actual room's unusual shape and Van Gogh's expressive amplification of that shape creates the specific spatial experience of the Bedroom paintings — a room that feels real and imagined simultaneously, both documented and designed.

Gauguin and the Bedroom: The Context of the Commission

Van Gogh painted the first Bedroom in October 1888, approximately three weeks before Paul Gauguin's arrival at the Yellow House on 23 October 1888. The painting was made in the context of Van Gogh's preparations for Gauguin's visit: he had been decorating the Yellow House for months in anticipation of the planned Studio of the South community, and the Bedroom was the culminating record of the domestic space he had prepared. He wrote to Theo that the painting was intended to convey the quality of the room — its restfulness, its warmth, its personal character — more effectively than a verbal description.

After the ear incident of 23 December 1888 (which ended the 63-day Gauguin cohabitation), the Yellow House was no longer habitable for Van Gogh — he was hospitalised, and when he returned to the house in January 1889, he found it in disarray. He sent the Bedroom painting to Theo in Paris as part of a parcel of works. When he subsequently painted the Saint-Rémy copies in September 1889, he was working from memory of a room he no longer had access to — a room that would be demolished in 1944, six years after the bombing of Arles. The copies are therefore both memorial images (of a room Van Gogh no longer occupied) and exercises in reconstruction (of a space preserved only in paint and in the memory of its maker).

Three Institutions, Three Versions: Amsterdam, Chicago, Paris

The distribution of the three Bedroom versions across three of the most significant art institutions in the world — the Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Musée d'Orsay Paris — is a consequence of Jo van Gogh-Bonger's strategic management of the estate after 1891. Jo kept the primary Amsterdam version with the family collection (now the Van Gogh Museum deposit). The Chicago version was sold through the Parisian art dealer Paul Cassirer and eventually reached the Art Institute of Chicago in 1926. The Paris version followed a different path through several French collections before entering the Musée d'Orsay's collection.

The three institutions collaborated in 2016 on a joint exhibition — "Van Gogh's Bedrooms" at the Art Institute of Chicago — that brought all three versions together for the first time since 1889. The exhibition reconstructed the actual Yellow House bedroom in full-scale using architectural analysis of the room's dimensions (from Arles city records and Van Gogh's letters) and the three versions' consistent details. The reconstructed room allowed visitors to compare the actual spatial experience of the room with Van Gogh's painted documentation of it — confirming both the room's unusual trapezoidal shape and Van Gogh's expressive amplification of the distortion.

The Recursive Installation: Your Bedroom Has a Painting of a Bedroom

Installing Van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles above your bed creates a recursive spatial experience: your bedroom contains a painting of a bedroom. The painting depicts a room that was a bedroom; it now hangs in a room that is a bedroom. The two bedrooms — the one depicted in the paint and the one containing the paint — are in dialogue. This is not a trivial observation: it is the specific contextual argument for this work in this room type. Van Gogh made the painting to document his bedroom and communicate its character; hanging it in your bedroom makes your bedroom the inheritor of that communication.

The specific colour relationships in the painting — warm yellow furniture against pale violet walls, lemon bedding against scarlet blanket, the blue basin and orange toilet stand as complementary accents — are not merely documentary but prescriptive. Van Gogh designed these colour relationships to produce the specific effects he described: rest, warmth, the quality of a space that belongs to the person who lives in it. When the painting hangs in a bedroom, these colour relationships interact with the room's own palette, creating the warm-cool tension that Van Gogh designed into the painting at the level of the bedroom it depicts.

DeckArts

Van Gogh — Bedroom in Arles (~$140)

October 1888, oil on canvas, 72 × 90 cm, Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam. The only major Van Gogh that documents his own domestic space. Three versions in three institutions. The recursive installation: your bedroom with a painting of a bedroom. On Canadian maple ~$140.

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FAQ

How many versions of Van Gogh's Bedroom are there?

Van Gogh painted three versions of the Bedroom in Arles: October 1888 (Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam, 72 × 90 cm — the primary version); September 1889 (Art Institute of Chicago, 73.6 × 92.3 cm — full-scale copy made from memory at Saint-Rémy for Theo); September 1889 (Musée d'Orsay Paris, 57.5 × 74 cm — smaller copy for his mother and sister). All three were brought together for the first time since 1889 at the Art Institute of Chicago's 2016 exhibition "Van Gogh's Bedrooms."

Why does the Bedroom in Arles look distorted?

The Bedroom in Arles' distorted perspective is explained by two factors: the Yellow House's actual bedroom was a non-rectangular trapezoidal room (the building occupied a corner plot where two streets met at a non-right angle), confirmed by Arles city records and Van Gogh's own building diagrams; and Van Gogh may have further amplified the spatial distortion for expressive effect. The tilted floor and converging walls are therefore both documentary (recording the room's actual unusual shape) and expressive (intensifying the spatial experience beyond the actual room's dimensions).

What do the colours in Van Gogh's Bedroom mean?

Van Gogh described the colour programme of the Bedroom in Arles in Letter 705 (16 October 1888): pale violet walls (calming, slightly dissociated ground), yellow furniture (warmth against the cool violet), lemon-yellow bedding (lightest, brightest tone), scarlet blanket (warmest, most saturated accent), green window (complementary to the red tile floor), blue basin and orange toilet stand (complementary pair that vibrates at small-object scale). The intention: "The colour is to do the job here... looking at the picture ought to rest the brain, or rather, the imagination."

Article Summary

Van Gogh (Zundert 1853 – Auvers-sur-Oise 1890) painted the Bedroom in Arles (October 1888, oil on canvas, 72 × 90 cm, Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam) as the first major work documenting his own domestic space — the Yellow House (2 Place Lamartine, Arles, demolished 1944 after Allied bombing 25 June 1944) was his first self-rented home at age 35. Three versions: Amsterdam (primary, October 1888), Chicago (full-scale Saint-Rémy copy, September 1889, Art Institute of Chicago), Paris (small Saint-Rémy copy, September 1889, Musée d'Orsay). Chicago, Amsterdam, Paris showed all three together in 2016 for the first time since 1889. Colour programme from Letter 705 (16 Oct 1888): "looking at the picture ought to rest the brain." Trapezoidal room shape confirmed by Arles city records. Recursive installation: bedroom contains painting of bedroom. DeckArts from ~$140. Canadian maple. UV archival 100+ years. Berlin. 30-day return.

About the Author

Stanislav Arnautov is the founder of DeckArts and a creative director originally from Ukraine, now based in Berlin.