The Bedroom

His own small room at the Yellow House, painted flat as a Japanese print, where the color was meant to do all the work and make the mind rest.

1. 1
   A floor that tilts, for a real reason

   The whole lower half, the red-tiled floor running up toward the bed

   The floor tips up at you and the walls seem to lean, and the lazy reading is that Van Gogh simply could not do perspective. He could. The real bedroom was not rectangular; it was a trapezoid, with an obtuse angle at the front-left and an acute angle at the right, so part of the “wrong” perspective is the genuinely odd shape of the room, and part is his deliberate flattening. Both at once.
2. 2
   A bed for one, framed as rest

   Right side, the wooden bed with two pillows and a turned-down red coverlet

   Two pillows lie on a bed turned down for a single sleeper. It would be easy to read the empty single bed as loneliness, but that is later interpretation laid over the picture. In his own letter Van Gogh framed the whole room as an image of rest and sleep, made while he was worn out and recovering, not as a portrait of isolation.
3. 3
   The butter-yellow furniture he named

   The pair of rush-seated chairs, one at the foot of the bed and one by the wall

   The two simple chairs with woven rush seats are the “fresh butter” yellow Van Gogh listed by name in his letter to Theo, where he wrote out the color of every object in the room. They let you point straight at his documented palette: the chairs and bed butter-yellow, the floor red tiles, the basin blue, the window green.
4. 4
   Two friends on the wall

   Upper right, the pair of small framed portraits above the bed

   In this first version the pictures on the wall are small portraits of two friends, usually identified as the poet Eugène Boch and the soldier Paul-Eugène Milliet (the exact which-is-which differs between sources, so read them simply as portraits of friends). These wall pictures are the tell that tells the three versions of the Bedroom apart.
5. 5
   The room’s one opening

   The back wall, the green shuttered casement window

   At the back, a shuttered casement window in green looks out onto the Place Lamartine and the public garden outside the Yellow House. It is the single opening to the world in an otherwise closed, snug room, the seam between Van Gogh’s private space of rest and the street.
6. 6
   Color instead of shadow

   Everywhere, the broad flat areas of unmodelled color

   Look for the cast shadows under the bed, the chairs, the table, and you will not find them. Van Gogh wrote that he had removed the shadows and cast shadows and colored the room in flat, plain tints “like the Japanese prints.” The flatness is his own stated technique, not a failing, and it is why the room reads as a pattern of pure color rather than a modelled, three-dimensional box.