Stop and Look: Bedroom in Arles (1888), by Vincent van Gogh
This is one of three versions of the subject, all slightly different in minor details, and more noticeably in variations of colour, but surprisingly similar in almost all other respects. It’s remarkable that van Gogh could reproduce an apparently spontaneous picture with such accuracy, retaining in each version the same careless simplicity.
Simplicity is the keynote. This is the artist’s bedroom, painted just as it was, surely. He shows, without sentimentality but with a curious passionate intensity, the unpretentious facts of his life in Arles, where he had gone to escape the depressing conditions of the Belgian mining community amongst whom he had been living.
The lack of pretension makes for a picture that is naïve in its impact: the bright schematic colours, the slightly wobbly perspective, convince us that the painter is single-mindedly recording his own bedroom, simply because it is his own room. We feel an affection for his familiar surroundings as though they were those of a close friend. He approaches his living quarters as he does his own face, which we frequently painted: the glinting mirror, plain wash-stand and rush-seated chairs are like his own features, accepted as daily accompaniments to his life.
Perhaps the quirky perspective of the painted room hints at the impending catastrophe of Vincent’s last years: the attacks of mania (his sliced-off ear was an early sign) that led to his being confined, at first with his own agreement, and later, at the request of concerned neighbours, in Saint Paul’s hospital for the mentally ill at St-Rémy-en-Provence. He was there for a year, then returned to Paris, but a suicide attempt in July1890 led to complications of which he died on the 29th of that month. Looking at his bedroom in the light of these tragic facts we have difficulty in editing out the hindsight that perceives self-doubt and self-loathing in the innocent details. But there’s nothing portentous or doom-laden about the little bedroom. The landscape above the bed is as plain as a landscape could be, and the left-hand picture on the wall beside the bed is a self-portrait that betrays no introspection. We should not look for anguish where we are only invited to see banal facts – facts, though, that were the intimate details of the artist’s dedicated life.
Unable to bring that life into a coherent order he was greatly dependent on his slightly younger brother, Theo, an art dealer who supported him financially and even more importantly with sympathy both moral and aesthetic. The story of the two brothers’ interrelationship is in itself worth telling, but it’s tangential to the homely tale of van Gogh’s attempts to find creative fulfilment in a life of almost monastic isolation and self-denial.
The tortured character of much of van Gogh’s work – the swirling foliage of his trees, the spiralling stars of his night skies – seems to be the expression of an inner turmoil that is barely kept in check, and the tranquil interior of his room as he presents it here represents a haven of peace and stability to which he always longed to return. He had been brought up in a pious Christian family and had himself thought of becoming a minister, thinking deeply on matters religious and philosophical. Every detail of the world he saw around him had a bearing on human experience, which it was his aim to expound in paint, or in the equally expressive dots and dashes of his striking pen drawings. It’s the intimate relationship between the technique of his work and his anguished mind that makes him, as an artist, such an irresistible subject for commentary, as though we were all psychiatrists using the paintings and drawings as evidence in our research.
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