阿尔勒的卧室

This is the smallest and last of three versions of a room Van Gogh no longer had. He first painted his bedroom in the Yellow House at Arles in 1888, proud of the plain furniture and the promise of a settled life. That life fell apart within months. By September 1889 he was a patient in the asylum at Saint-Rémy, and there, working from his earlier canvases, he made this reduced copy to send home to his mother and his sister Wil. The tilted floor and the leaning walls are not mistakes. He wanted the room to feel like rest, the colours chosen, he told his brother, to suggest sleep. He painted it from memory of a house he would never move back into.