A tilted room for one sleeper
Stand in front of it and you feel the tilt before you understand it. The red-tiled floor rushes up toward you as if the whole room were tipping forward to spill its furniture into your lap; the far wall leans; the bed and chairs sit at angles that do not quite agree with one another. It is a small canvas for all that motion, about 2 feet 4 inches tall and 2 feet 11½ inches wide (72 by 90 centimeters), a picture you could carry under one arm, and yet the little room inside it will not hold still.
Why the corner won't sit square
Track the line where the two walls meet at the back, then follow each wall forward, and you will see why the box never reads as square: the room narrows and widens at the wrong rate, the corners refusing to behave. The easy verdict is that Van Gogh could not draw perspective. He could. The real bedroom was a trapezoid(a four-sided shape with no right angles), wider at the front-left corner and pinched sharper on the right, so the genuine geometry of the room was already odd before he touched it. He then flattened what was left, pressing the depth out of it. The leaning walls are part true measurement, part deliberate squash, and watching the two fight each other is most of the picture’s strange energy.
The window, and the single recession
Now find the one place the eye is allowed to travel back rather than up. At the rear wall sits a green shuttered casement window, and it is the only opening in the room, the single seam where the snug box lets in the outside (it looks onto the Place Lamartine and the public garden). Above the bed hang two small framed portraits, in this first version two friends, usually named as the painter Eugène Boch and the soldier Paul-Eugène Milliet (sources disagree on which is which, so read them simply as friends). Those wall pictures are tiny, but they are load-bearing: the pictures on the wall are the detail that tells the three versions of the Bedroom apart.
No shadow anywhere
Go looking for a cast shadow: under the bed, beneath the two rush-seated chairs, around the legs of the table. You will not find one. Every object is a flat slab of its own color, the bed and chairs in the “fresh butter” yellow he listed, the basin blue on its orange washstand, the doors lilac, each shape laid down whole with no darkening at its edges to round it out. In description “flat, plain tints like the Japanese prints” sounds like a technical note; on the canvas it is the thing you see, a room built like a stack of colored paper rather than a modeled three-dimensional box. The bed itself, turned down for one and carrying its two pillows, could read as lonely; resist that, because the flatness is not melancholy, it is the calm he was after, the color doing its quiet job.