The Bedroom

The narrow upstairs room of the Yellow House at Arles, reduced to an almost childlike diagram of furniture and sleep, is among Vincent van Gogh’s most recognized paintings. He composed the picture in the autumn of 1888; after his collapse that December left the first canvas damaged, he reworked the scheme while confined at Saint-Rémy in the following year — straightening the perspective and saturating the walls with the “pale violet” he had insisted on to Theo, with the wood of the bed still “the color of fresh butter” and the bedclothes lemon and pale lime. Such a subject, he wrote, could rest the mind as a still life does, and this version — among the earliest reworkings — came to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1926 with the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection, where it has remained one of the most recognized interiors in art. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.