The Bedroom

Van Gogh was 36 and living in an asylum when he painted this picture of his own bedroom from memory. He had left the Yellow House at Arles months earlier; the room in it no longer existed for him except as something to describe. He had about a year to live.

He wrote to his brother Theo listing every colour by name — walls pale lilac, floor a broken faded red, chairs and bed chrome yellow, bedspread blood-red, washbasin blue — and said the point of the flatness, with no shadow anywhere in it, was to suggest rest. Two of those colours are now wrong on the canvas: the red he mixed into the walls has faded almost completely, so the violet he named reads today as plain blue. The floor tilts and the walls lean because the room genuinely was that shape. The Yellow House had a crooked corner.