The Bedroom

I am the second one. Before me there was a first bedroom, painted in Arles in October 1888, a month after Vincent moved into the yellow house. While he was in hospital the following winter, the river rose, water got into the house, and that canvas was damaged. So in September 1889, at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, with the damaged picture in front of him, he made me at the same size, line for line, a room copied from a room that was itself already a copy of a room.

People expect a copy to be timid. I was not painted timidly. Look at the floor, laid down in strokes of green and rose that run toward the back wall faster than any floor should. Look at the bed, a great slab of buttery wood with a headboard like a shut door, the coverlet the red he called blood-red, two pale pillows side by side. Two straw-seated chairs, one waiting by the bed, one pushed against the near wall. A towel on a nail. A jug in a basin, a few bottles, a little mirror. Coats hung on pegs. A landscape above the bed and two portraits tipped on their nails beside it.

He wrote to his brother listing the colours, and the list sounds like a shopping errand: walls pale lilac, floor a faded red, chairs and bed chrome yellow, window green. You will notice my walls are blue. That is the work of time, not of Vincent. One of the reds he mixed into the lilac was fugitive and has faded, leaving the blue behind. I am not the room he painted. I am the room he painted, minus a colour that left.

He meant the picture to be restful. He said so plainly. Visitors stand in front of me and talk about agitation, the tilt, the hurry of the boards, and they are not wrong either. Both are in me. A man can want stillness badly enough that the wanting shows in the brushwork.

He painted a third, smaller version at the same moment, a present for his mother and sister. I stayed with the work. I think most about the window, its green panes giving onto a green he never explained, the south pressing at the glass of a room he was no longer sleeping in.