Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter, born in Zundert on 30 March 1853 and died in Auvers-sur-Oise on 29 July 1890. He is counted among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art.

Van Gogh worked as a painter, draftsman and printmaker, and his work is associated with Post-Impressionism and Expressionism. In little more than ten years he made about 2,100 works of art, around 860 of them oil paintings, and most of them date from the last two years of his life. He painted landscapes, still lifes, portraits and self-portraits. His bold color and expressive, impulsive brushwork helped lay the foundations of modern art. He died by suicide at the age of 37, after years of mental illness and poverty.

His best-known paintings include The Potato Eaters, The Night Café, Café Terrace at Night, Starry Night Over the Rhone, The Starry Night, Sunflowers, Irises, Wheat Field with Cypresses, Wheatfield with Crows, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and his portraits of Dr. Gachet. His work is held by many museums, among them the Van Gogh Museum, the Kröller-Müller Museum, the Rijksmuseum, the Musée d’Orsay, the National Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Bedroom, the painting shown here, is oil on canvas and dates from 1889. It was painted in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. In 1888 van Gogh had moved into his own house in Arles, France, which he called the “Studio of the South,” hoping other artists would join him to work there. This canvas is one of three versions he painted of his bedroom in Arles, and the three share the title Bedroom in Arles. The museum notes that the vivid colors and dramatic perspective seem full of nervous energy, yet van Gogh meant the picture “to express utter repose.”

The canvas measures 73.6 by 92.3 centimeters. It is in the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago (accession number 1926.417), in the department of Painting and Sculpture of Europe.