Bedroom in Arles

Lore & Background

The painting depicts Van Gogh's bedroom at 2, Place Lamartine in Arles, Bouches-du-Rhône, France, known as the Yellow House. The door to the right opened on to the upper floor and the staircase; the door to the left was that of the guest room he held prepared for Gauguin; the window in the front wall looked on to Place Lamartine and its public gardens. This room was not rectangular but trapezoid with an obtuse angle in the left-hand corner of the front wall and an acute angle at the right.

Van Gogh started the first version during mid-October 1888 while staying in Arles, and explained his aims and means to his brother Theo: 'This time it’s simply my bedroom, but the color has to do the job here, and through its being simplified by giving a grander style to thin

Reader's Guide

The three versions of Bedroom in Arles are central to understanding Van Gogh's artistic intentions and personal circumstances. The first version, begun in mid-October 1888, was created after a sickness that left him bedridden, and he described it as a composition where 'the color has to do the job' and 'looking at the painting should rest the mind.' The second version was a repetition made in September 1889 after the original was damaged by a flood. The third version, a smaller reduction for his mother and sister, was finished later that same month. The paintings are distinguished by the pictures on the wall to the right: the first includes miniatures of The Poet and The Lover; the third has a miniature recalling his Peasant of Zundert self-portrait and an unidentifiable portrait possibly of his sister Wil. All three versions were brought together for an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016. The first version is on permanent loan to the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; the second is at the Art Institute of Chicago; the third is in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Roy Lichtenstein reproduced the work as Bedroom at Arles in 1992.

Did You Know?

• Van Gogh's own title for the composition was simply The Bedroom.
• The first version has miniatures of van Gogh's portraits of Eugène Boch (The Poet) and Paul-Eugène Milliet (The Lover) on the wall to the right.
• All three versions were brought together for an exhibition entitled Van Gogh's Bedrooms at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016.

The Asylum as Studio

Van Gogh's decision to voluntarily enter the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum on 8 May 1889 marked the beginning of one of the most extraordinarily productive stretches in his career. The facility, housed in a former monastery near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, catered to wealthy patients and was less than half full when he arrived. This fortunate circumstance meant he was granted not just a second-story bedroom but also a dedicated ground-floor room he could use as a painting studio. The admission followed the traumatic breakdown of late December 1888, during which he severed part of his own left ear. Despite the institutional setting, Van Gogh's output remained staggering. Over the course of his year-long stay, he produced works including the now-famous Irises, a striking blue self-portrait, and The Starry Night. Hospital rules forbade him from painting inside his bedroom, but he was permitted to make ink and charcoal sketches there, which he would later develop into finished canvases in his studio below. The east-facing window from his room became the subject of no fewer than twenty-one painted variations, each capturing the same enclosed wheat field and rolling Alpilles hills under different skies and conditions.

A Window View Reimagined

The Starry Night was completed around 18 June 1889, painted in Van Gogh's ground-floor studio rather than directly from his window, though it drew on the same east-facing vista he had sketched repeatedly. In a letter to his brother Theo, Vincent described watching the sunrise through the iron-barred window, observing an enclosed square of wheat beneath the sky. The finished canvas, however, is the only nocturne in his series of twenty-one variations on this view. It depicts the scene just before dawn, with the addition of a small village that exists in no actual landscape visible from the asylum — an imaginary element assembled from earlier sketches. The sky itself contains real astronomical references: researchers have confirmed that Venus, the morning star, was visible at dawn in Provence in spring 1889 and was nearly at its maximum brightness. The Moon also appears, though its rendering is not astronomically precise. In the foreground, cypress trees loom at an exaggerated scale, brought closer to the picture plane than in most of the other twenty variations. Van Gogh's own letters suggest he treated these trees primarily as formal, aesthetic elements rather than as carriers of deeper symbolic meaning.

A 'Failure' That Became a Touchstone

Perhaps the most striking irony surrounding The Starry Night is that its creator considered it a misstep. In letters to his brother Theo, Van Gogh referred to the painting as a 'failure,' a self-assessment that stands in sharp contrast to the work's eventual standing as a touchstone of modern art and one of the most instantly recognizable images in the Western canon. Over the decades, scholars have layered competing readings onto the canvas. Some art historians connect the swirling, turbulent sky to contemporary astronomical discoveries, while others interpret the churning forms as an externalization of Van Gogh's inner emotional turmoil during his asylum stay. Religious symbolism has also been proposed as a lens through which to read the composition. Yet Van Gogh's own correspondence complicates any purely symbolic reading; his letters indicate he regarded the exaggerated cypresses and other formal choices in largely aesthetic terms, concerned with color relationships and compositional dynamics rather than allegory. The painting's power, then, may lie precisely in this ambiguity — a work that resists a single fixed meaning while remaining viscerally immediate to any viewer.

From Theo's Inheritance to New York

The path The Starry Night traveled from Vincent's studio to its permanent home in New York spanned more than five decades and passed through numerous hands. Upon Vincent's death, the painting was inherited by his brother Theo. Tragically, Theo died just six months later, and the work passed to his widow, Jo. In 1901, Jo sold the canvas to the dealer Émile Schuffenecker, who in turn resold it back to her four years later in 1905. From 1906 through 1938, the painting belonged to Georgette P. van Stolk of Rotterdam. In 1938, the dealer Paul Rosenberg acquired it from van Stolk, and three years later he transferred it to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. The MoMA has held the painting in its permanent collection since 1941 and rarely, if ever, lends it to other institutions. Modern scientific analysis of the paint layers has confirmed that Van Gogh mixed ultramarine and cobalt blue to build the sky, while the stars and Moon were rendered in indian yellow and zinc yellow — pigments that have retained their luminosity for over a century and a half.

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