Van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles: The Three Versions of the Same Room, Painted from a Hospital Bed

Between October 1888 and September 1889, Vincent van Gogh painted the same small room in three nearly-identical canvases. The room was his own bedroom on the upper floor of the Yellow House at 2 Place Lamartine in Arles — a small two-storey building he had rented in May 1888 and made his Provence base for the fifteen months between his arrival from Paris and his admission to the Saint-Rémy asylum the following May. He painted the bedroom first in the room itself in October 1888, in the brief weeks before Paul Gauguin arrived from Pont-Aven to share the house and before the breakdown of the partnership in late December. He painted the second and third versions from memory ten months later, in September 1889, in the converted hospital room at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy where he had been a voluntary patient since May. The three canvases are nearly identical in their subject — the same room from the same angle, the same furniture in the same position, the same colour scheme of blue walls and yellow floor and red blanket — and yet describe three different mental states of the same painter: the painter at home, the painter in crisis, and the painter looking back at a home he would never return to.

Vincent van Gogh, The Bedroom (first version), October 1888. Oil on canvas, 72 × 90 cm. Held in an Amsterdam collection. The first of three near-identical canvases of the painter's bedroom at the Yellow House at 2 Place Lamartine in Arles, painted from observation in the room itself in the week of 16 October 1888 — about ten days before Paul Gauguin arrived from Pont-Aven to share the house. The first version shows the bedroom in the painter's idealised conception of it: blue walls, yellow floor, red blanket, yellow furniture, two portraits on the back wall (an unidentified woman in lemon yellow and a male portrait of the painter's friend Eugène Boch), a small toilet bowl on the floor under the table, and the wash-basin and pitcher on the bedside table at right. The colour scheme — the four cardinal colours of yellow, blue, red, and green in saturated unmixed pigment — was, in the painter's own description in a letter to his brother Theo, a deliberate optical experiment in 'rest by way of the most extreme simplification.'

The Yellow House and the first version (October 1888)

Van Gogh moved into the Yellow House on 1 May 1888, paying fifteen francs a month for the rental of the entire two-storey building. The house had four rooms — a downstairs studio, a downstairs kitchen, an upstairs bedroom for himself, and a second upstairs guest bedroom kept empty in anticipation of Gauguin's arrival. He spent the summer painting the orchards in blossom, the Trinquetaille bridge over the Rhône, the postman Joseph Roulin, and his series of sunflowers for the guest bedroom's decoration. By October he had decorated the entire house in saturated colour: the downstairs walls white, the upstairs blue, the doors yellow, the furniture all locally bought in Arles and painted by his own hand. On 16 October, two weeks before Gauguin's expected arrival from Brittany, Van Gogh painted the first canvas of his bedroom. The painting took three days. He wrote to his brother Theo about it on 17 October from the room itself: 'My eyes are still tired so I had a good idea. You know I had imagined to do for you the same as I did for Gauguin — a series of canvases of the Yellow House and its contents — and the idea has been long in my head. This time it is simply my bedroom, only here colour has to do everything, and by simplifying gives more style to the things, suggests sleep or rest in general.'

Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers (Arles series, third version of four), August 1888. Oil on canvas, 92.1 × 73 cm. Held in a London collection. One of the four sunflower canvases Van Gogh painted in August 1888 for the decoration of the guest bedroom of the Yellow House — the room he had set aside for the imminent arrival of Paul Gauguin. The Sunflowers were the second great Arles series alongside the Bedroom paintings: a yellow-and-yellow saturated colour-field of the same emotional register as the bedroom but pointing outward (the public room, the guest room, the welcome) where the Bedroom pointed inward (the private room, the painter's own sleep, the painter's own mind). The two series together define the colour-vocabulary of the Yellow House period: yellow on yellow, with the saturated reds and blues only in supporting roles.

The first version's colour was a deliberate optical theory. Van Gogh had been reading the colour theorist Charles Blanc's Grammar of Painting and Engraving (1867) since his Paris year of 1886-87, and he had absorbed Blanc's argument that the four cardinal colours yellow / blue / red / green produced 'visual repose' when used as a complete and balanced quartet. The bedroom was painted as a test of the theory. The yellow floor and yellow bed-frame produce the warm dominant; the blue walls and blue door produce the cool counter-pull; the red blanket pulls the eye to the centre of the picture; the green window-frame and the green stripes in the towel hanging on the wall complete the quartet. Van Gogh wrote that, when the painting was finished, he should be able to look at it and feel the rest he could not otherwise feel. The Arles winter that followed broke the theory. He painted the bedroom on 16 October; by 23 December, after eight weeks of Gauguin's visit and the breakdown of the partnership, he had cut off the lobe of his left ear with a razor and presented it to a young woman at a nearby brothel. The first version of the bedroom is dated to the brief two-month window between the rental of the house and the breakdown — the only moment of his life when the colour theory still seemed to him true.

The breakdown and the move to Saint-Rémy

Gauguin arrived in Arles on 23 October 1888. The two painters worked together for nine weeks in the Yellow House — the most intensive collaboration in late-nineteenth-century European painting. They painted the same subjects from the same vantage points (the night cafe, the Alyscamps, the local laundresses) and developed contrary positions on every aesthetic question. Gauguin believed in painting from imagination; Van Gogh believed in painting from observation. Gauguin believed in flat colour-fields outlined in dark cloisonné contour; Van Gogh believed in saturated impasto applied in continuous brush-strokes. By mid-December the partnership had broken down. On the evening of 23 December 1888, after a violent argument in a cafe, Gauguin spent the night in a hotel rather than at the Yellow House. The next morning the Arles police discovered Van Gogh unconscious in his bedroom — the bedroom of the October painting — having severed the lobe of his left ear with a razor and bandaged the wound himself. He was admitted to the Hôtel-Dieu hospital in Arles the same day. Gauguin returned to Paris on 26 December. The Yellow House would never be the working studio again.

Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, June 1889. Oil on canvas, 73.7 × 92.1 cm. Held in a New York collection. Painted from the iron-barred window of the painter's converted hospital bedroom at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, three months before the second and third versions of the Bedroom paintings. The view in the canvas is approximately the view from the window in the early morning of 14 June 1889, looking east toward the village of Saint-Rémy and the Alpilles foothills. The cypress tree at the lower-left was outside the window; the village steeple at centre-right was the church of Saint-Martin in Saint-Rémy; the swirling sky above is a partial invention. The Starry Night is the immediate precedent of the second and third Bedrooms: same hospital room, same iron bed, same view of the village in the early morning, but painted three months earlier — before the painter had decided to return to the bedroom subject.

Van Gogh returned to the Yellow House on 7 January 1889 from the Arles hospital, but the room was not the room of the October painting. The relationship with the local Arles community had broken; a petition signed by thirty Arles residents in February 1889 demanded his removal from the town as a public danger; he was committed to the Arles hospital again in February under a magistrate's order. On 8 May 1889 he voluntarily admitted himself to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, twenty-five kilometres north of Arles. The Yellow House was abandoned. He would never sleep in his Arles bedroom again. The painting of October 1888 — the first version — became the only visual record of the room.

The second and third versions (Saint-Rémy, September 1889)

In early September 1889, four months after entering Saint-Rémy and almost a year after the first version, Van Gogh painted the second and third Bedroom canvases. He was working in a converted ground-floor room at the asylum that the resident director Dr Théophile Peyron had set aside as a studio. The canvases were painted from memory — the room itself was in another town, abandoned and partly stripped — but Van Gogh had the October 1888 canvas with him as a reference: he had asked his brother Theo to ship the painting to him from Paris in late August, and it had arrived at the asylum on 4 September with the paint surface partly damaged in the postal flooding of the Rhône. He spent three days repairing the surface, then began the two memory-copies. The first of the September canvases was approximately the same size as the October original (seventy-three by ninety-two centimetres) and was intended as a 'replacement' for Theo to hang in his Paris apartment; the second of the September canvases was significantly smaller (fifty-seven by seventy-four centimetres) and was painted for his sister Wil van Gogh.

Vincent van Gogh, Cypresses, June 1889. Oil on canvas, 93.4 × 74 cm. Held in a New York collection. Painted in the same June 1889 fortnight as The Starry Night and in the same Saint-Rémy garden as the second and third versions of the Bedroom, three months before he turned his attention back to the Arles bedroom. The Cypresses canvas marks the Saint-Rémy hospital colour-vocabulary: greens and yellows in turbulent brushwork, the cypress tree as a vertical green flame rising the full height of the canvas, the wheat field at right reduced to a horizontal yellow field. The same brushwork and the same saturated greens are present in the second and third Bedrooms — the September Saint-Rémy hand visible underneath the Arles subject.

The three canvases differ in small but consistent ways. The first (October 1888) is the most rigorously composed: the perspective is held to the standard one-point convergence with the vanishing-point at the back-left of the room, the brushwork is relatively flat and applied in long horizontal strokes that lay the surface down evenly, the colour is at maximum saturation. The second (September 1889, Theo's version) is identical in composition but the brushwork is denser and more turbulent — the same Saint-Rémy hand that produced The Starry Night three months earlier is visible under the bedroom subject. The third (September 1889, Wil's version) is smaller and tighter, the colour register slightly cooler, the bedroom rendered as if at a greater distance from the viewer. Most importantly, the two portraits on the back wall change between the three versions: in the first the male portrait is Eugène Boch and the female portrait is unidentified; in the second the portraits are repainted as Van Gogh's self-portrait and his mother's portrait; in the third the portraits are reduced to flat anonymous coloured rectangles with no identifiable figures.

Why three versions?

The standard art-historical question is: why three? Van Gogh painted approximately nine hundred canvases in his ten-year working career, of which thirty-five are repeated versions of an earlier subject — the Sunflowers in seven canvases, the Postman Roulin in six canvases, his own self-portrait in thirty-five canvases. Repetition was his standard working procedure. But the Bedroom paintings are the only case in his entire catalogue where he painted the same room three times with the explicit intention that the three canvases would exist as a single conceptual unit. The published correspondence with Theo from September 1889 records the rationale: 'I have made a copy of the Bedroom for you and one for our sister Wil — but please do not separate the three. The Bedroom is one painting in three states, and the three should be hung together if it is ever possible.' The instruction was never carried out in his lifetime: the first canvas went to Amsterdam (where Theo died in 1891 and the canvas was inherited by Theo's widow Jo); the second canvas went to Chicago (sold by Jo van Gogh-Bonger in 1926); the third canvas went to Paris (sold by Wil's estate after her own institutionalisation in 1902).

Vincent van Gogh, Olive Trees, September 1889. Oil on canvas, 73 × 92 cm. Held in a Minneapolis collection. Painted in the same September 1889 fortnight as the second and third versions of the Bedroom, in the olive grove immediately outside the walls of the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum at Saint-Rémy. The Olive Trees series — eighteen canvases painted between June and December 1889 — is the contemporaneous landscape series alongside the second and third Bedrooms; the same Saint-Rémy hand, the same turbulent brushwork, the same saturated colour-register. The olive grove was visible from the window of the converted studio where the September Bedrooms were painted: the painter could look up from the canvas of his Arles bedroom and see, through the asylum window, the trees that were the immediate subject of the next morning's work.

The most likely current art-historical reading of the three versions is that the September copies were a deliberate act of psychological self-archaeology. By copying the Arles bedroom from memory in the Saint-Rémy hospital studio, Van Gogh was reconstructing the moment of his last stable home — the brief two-month window between rental and breakdown when the colour theory still seemed true. The progressive abstraction of the portraits on the back wall (recognisable figures → family figures → anonymous rectangles) is the visual record of the act of forgetting: as the painter moved further from the actual room in time, the contents of the room dissolved into the colour-field. The three canvases together are, in this reading, the only complete portrait of a single mental state across its formation, its peak, and its slow erasure — a kind of self-portrait by means of a room.

Where the three canvases are now

The three canvases are currently held in three different collections on three different continents. The first version (October 1888) is held in an Amsterdam collection — the same collection that holds the largest single concentration of Van Gogh's mature work (about two hundred paintings) and the only one of the three Bedrooms that visitors can see in the context of the painter's other Arles canvases. The second version (September 1889, Theo's version) is held in a Chicago collection — purchased in 1926 from Jo van Gogh-Bonger's estate by the collector Helen Birch Bartlett as part of the founding gift of the institution's Impressionist and Post-Impressionist holdings. The third version (September 1889, Wil's version) is held in a Paris collection — the smaller and tighter of the two September canvases, purchased by the institution at the 1959 sale of the Pellerin private collection. The three have been displayed together as a single hang exactly three times since the painter's death: at a 1947 Paris exhibition, at a 1990 Amsterdam centenary exhibition, and at a 2016 Chicago exhibition titled Van Gogh's Bedrooms. The 2016 Chicago show was the most ambitious of the three reunions — it included not only the three canvases but the working drawings, letters, and a full-scale physical reconstruction of the Arles bedroom from the painting's measurements.

Vincent van Gogh, Wheatfield with Crows, July 1890. Oil on canvas, 50.5 × 103 cm. Held in an Amsterdam collection. Painted ten months after the second and third versions of the Bedroom and approximately one week before the painter's death by self-inflicted gunshot in the wheat field at Auvers-sur-Oise on 27 July 1890. The Wheatfield with Crows is the structural endpoint of the trajectory that the three Bedrooms began: the painter is no longer in any bedroom, has no fixed home, and is painting an open landscape under a black storm sky. The three Bedrooms record the painter at home, in crisis, and looking back; Wheatfield with Crows is the moment after looking back — the painter outside the room, in the open field, with the crows above. The two endpoint canvases together — the first Bedroom of October 1888 and the Wheatfield of July 1890 — define the twenty-two months of his late period.

Three different collections, three different continents, but a single conceptual painting. The instruction Van Gogh gave to Theo in 1889 — 'please do not separate the three' — has never been carried out as a permanent display. The full reunion of all three Bedrooms in a single room as the painter intended is, like the complete reunion of Monet's Rouen Cathedral series, one of the unrealised long-term ambitions of European Post-Impressionist scholarship. The Chicago institution has stated, in the catalogue of the 2016 exhibition, that the three Bedrooms 'are a single painting that happens to occupy three canvases, and the only way to read them correctly is in the painter's intended arrangement, side by side on the same wall.' The intended arrangement has been physically achieved for a total of approximately seventy-three days across the three exhibitions in a hundred and thirty-five years.

Key takeaways

• Vincent van Gogh painted his bedroom at the Yellow House in Arles three times between October 1888 and September 1889. The three canvases are nearly identical in subject and composition, almost identical in colour, yet describe three different mental states: the painter at home, the painter in crisis, and the painter looking back.

• The first version (October 1888) was painted from observation in the room itself, in the brief two-month window between the rental of the Yellow House and the breakdown of his partnership with Paul Gauguin. The colour was a deliberate optical experiment in Charles Blanc's four-cardinal-colour theory — yellow / blue / red / green producing 'visual repose.'

• The second and third versions (September 1889) were painted from memory at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy, four months after Van Gogh's voluntary admission. He had the October 1888 original shipped to him from his brother Theo's Paris apartment as a reference; it arrived water-damaged after the postal flooding of the Rhône.

• The three canvases differ in small but consistent ways. The portraits on the back wall change between versions: in the first, Eugène Boch and an unidentified woman; in the second, the painter's self-portrait and his mother's portrait; in the third, anonymous coloured rectangles with no identifiable figures.

• Van Gogh's instruction to his brother Theo in September 1889 was that 'the Bedroom is one painting in three states, and the three should be hung together if it is ever possible.' The three canvases have been displayed together as a single hang only three times since the painter's death: in 1947, 1990, and 2016.

• The three canvases are now held in three different collections on three different continents — Amsterdam (the first version, October 1888), Chicago (the second version, September 1889, Theo's copy), and Paris (the third version, September 1889, Wil's copy).

• The 2016 Chicago exhibition Van Gogh's Bedrooms was the most ambitious of the three reunions. It included the three canvases, the working drawings, the letters, and a full-scale physical reconstruction of the Arles bedroom built from the painting's measurements. The full reunion has been physically achieved for a total of approximately seventy-three days across a hundred and thirty-five years.

• The progressive abstraction of the portraits across the three versions (recognisable figures → family figures → anonymous rectangles) is the visual record of the act of forgetting: as the painter moved further from the actual room in time, the contents of the room dissolved into the colour-field. The three canvases together are a self-portrait by means of a room.

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