Where the color does the job

We know more about how Van Gogh made this picture than almost any other, because he wrote it all down for his brother Theo in a letter as he was painting it, in mid-October 1888. (One legend to put down first: you will read that he painted the Bedroom “in a single day.” That is not firmly documented and is best not asserted. The safe version, the one the record supports, is that he painted it quickly, over a short span in mid-October 1888.)

His stated aim was startlingly simple. The picture, he told Theo, was “simply my bedroom, but the color has to do the job here,” meant “to be suggestive of rest or of sleep in general,” so that “looking at the painting should rest the mind, or rather the imagination.” In other words, the room is not really the subject. The coloris the subject, and the color’s job is to make you feel calm. That is the whole intention of the painting, in his own words.

In the same letter he names his technique just as plainly: “the shadows and cast shadows are removed; it’s colored in flat, plain tints like the Japanese prints.” This matters. The standard European way to make a room look real is to model every object with light and shadow so it bulges into three dimensions. Van Gogh did the opposite on purpose. He stripped the cast shadows out and laid the room down in broad, flat areas of unmixed color, the way the Japanese woodblock prints he collected and admired handled space: as pattern, not as modeled volume. The flatness people sometimes mistake for clumsiness is a deliberate borrowing, and it is his own description, not a later art-historian’s guess.

He even wrote out the color scheme object by object, which lets us see exactly what he intended(some of it has shifted with age, and the walls now read bluer than the “pale violet” he names). His list: walls pale violet, floor red tiles, bed and chairs fresh-butter yellow, sheets and pillows a very pale lemon green, the coverlet scarlet, the window green, the washstand orange, the basin blue, the doors lilac. To make sure Theo could picture it, he drew small sketches of the composition right inside the letters, to Theo and to Gauguin both.