The Yellow House, waiting for Gauguin

In 1888 Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) rented a small house at 2, Place Lamartine in Arles, a town in the south of France. He painted its outside walls and called it the Yellow House, and he had a dream for it: it would become a “Studio of the South,” a colony where painters lived and worked together. The first painter he hoped to lure was Paul Gauguin, and through the autumn of 1888 Van Gogh furnished and decorated the house to be ready for him.

It was while preparing the house and waiting for a friend that he painted his own bedroom. By his own account he had just been worn out and bedridden for several days, and he conceived the picture as an image of rest. This is the detail that corrects every gloomy reading of the painting that came later: he did not paint the room as a cell or a symbol of his loneliness. He painted it as a place to sleep, made by a tired man, just weeks before Gauguin actually arrived (the two months that followed, which ended in the breakdown and the severed ear, are another story; this picture comes before all that).

One thing to fix before you look. There are three versions of this painting, all by Van Gogh’s own hand, and they look nearly identical. This is about the first one, painted in mid-October 1888 and now in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. He painted the other two the following year (a full-size copy now in Chicago and a smaller one now in Paris), and a later section explains exactly why. For now: everything described here is the original, the one he made in the Yellow House while he still had hopes for it.