Dormitory in the Hospital in Arles

In February 1889 a group of people in Arles signed a petition to the mayor asking that Van Gogh be shut away, and he spent much of that spring inside the town hospital as a patient. In April he painted its men's ward from within, the long room he had been sleeping in, beds down both walls, a stove in the middle with figures gathered round it. He stretched the room longer than it really was and tipped the floor up towards you. On 8 May he left Arles for the asylum at Saint-Remy. The Swiss collector Oskar Reinhart bought the canvas in 1925 for his house above Winterthur. The hospital itself is still standing in Arles, now a cultural centre, its courtyard garden replanted to match the other picture he made there.