Agostina Segatori Sitting in the Café du Tambourin
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
The Bedroom, Vincent van Gogh, 1888. Oil on canvas, 72.4 × 91.3 cm. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Public domain.
The image on this page is a studio placeholder, not the painting. The open-access file from Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam replaces it when the gallery's image pipeline runs — we would rather show you a card that says so than a reproduction we have not verified.
Post-Impressionism
The Bedroom
Vincent van Gogh · 1888
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 72.4 × 91.3 cm
- Held by
- Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
- Licence
- Public domain
- Movement
- Post-Impressionism
- Country
- France
The painter
Vincent van Gogh
Van Gogh painted for roughly ten years, and for the first five of them he was not very good. That is worth saying plainly, because the usual telling turns him into a natural whose genius was simply unrecognised. He trained himself late, starting at twenty-seven after failing as an art dealer, a teacher and a lay preacher, and the early Dutch work is dark, thick and often badly drawn — he knew it, and he kept drawing figures for years specifically because he knew it.
Nearby
Related works
Café Terrace at Night
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo
The Potato Eaters
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
The Starry Night
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Sunflowers
The National Gallery, London
What to look at
Van Gogh described what he wanted from this painting with unusual precision: the colour was to do everything, and what it was to do was suggest rest. He listed the pairs in a letter — pale violet walls, red tiles, butter-yellow bed and chairs, lemon-green sheets, blood-red blanket, orange washstand, blue basin, green window. Flat, unshaded, no cast shadows anywhere, which is directly borrowed from the Japanese prints he had been collecting. The result is a room that will not sit still. The perspective is off in a way that is partly the actual trapezoidal room and partly him: the floor tilts up, the bed pushes forward, the far wall leans. Nothing recedes the way it should, and the furniture seems to crowd towards you. He painted three versions. This is the first, and the one damaged by flooding in 1889, which is why the other two exist at all.