Vincent's room in Arles
The chambre of Van Gogh to Arles
Oils on linen, 57,5 x 74 cm.
Vincent van Gogh (1853 - 1890)
Museum of Orsay, Paris.
They go Goh goes so far as to realize three pictures with the same motive, the room that it had in Arles.
The first one, of 72 x 90 cm, was realized in September, 1888 and he suffered a severe deterioration for a flood happened during its internment in the hospital of Arles. At present it is in the Museum of Van Gogh in Ámsterdam. The second one of them, of equal measurement, survives in Art Institute of Chicago. The third version is something smaller than the previous ones (57,5 cm per 74 cm) and it realized it like a copy of the first one that I send to its Dutch family. This work is the one that is here, in the Museum of Orsay. Esta obra es la que se encuentra aquí, en el Museo de Orsay.
Three pictures are described perfectly in its letters and are distinguishable for the pictures of the wall of the right. In to the first version Van Gogh placed two portraits of its friends Eugne Bosch y Paul-Eugène Milliet. This version deteriorated and Vincent sends him to its brother “a repetition” maintaining the same technical characteristics although with some changes. And the third version Van Gogh says to its brother Theo that it is going to do “a reduction” that is a such copy which but to limited scale.
Perhaps more that in many of its self-portraits, Vincent's bedroom in Arles introduces us in the intimate dimension, in a space deprived of the artist.
It shows a perspective with the “typical torsion” proper of the painter, contributing its personal stamp to the scene. Van Gogh furnished its stay with an almost Spartan simplicity, as if it was a monastic bedroom. For him he supposed a peace isolated area. It is as if he wanted to show the contrast that supposes the calmness of the hearth with its untidy interior life. Nevertheless, the spatial representation shows a light defect of perspective that creates an imbalance impression: the compress of the bed is not placed in straight angle with the wall. The soil is not straight, turns out to be elusive. Sin embargo, la representación espacial muestra un ligero defecto de perspectiva que crea una impresión de desequilibrio: el cabezal de la cama no está situado en ángulo recto con la pared. El suelo no está recto, aparece huidizo.
A novel fact, in the history of the painting, constitutes it the strange perspective with which Van Gogh shows us the present objects in the picture: the feet of the bed are showed from below, while the chair, the pillow or the table are seen from above.
This so personal conception and the peculiar application of the color do that this work has such a typical symbolic content in the style of Van Gogh. Insurance of himself, the painter has been included in the scene by means of this picture with its self-portrait hung by the wall.
Since we have seen at first this one it is the copy that Van Gogh made come to its mother and sister in 1889. Later it was bought by a German collector that in turn Paul Rosenberg of Paris sold it to the gallery. In the twenties it happened to be part of the collection Kojiro Matsukata. Owing to the Treaty of Peace, agreed after the second world war, the Japanese state it goes on to be able of France.
In the achievement of the work, Van Gogh leaves its texture and traditional forms. Here it creates a flat surface of clear oriental inspiration mixing this way the European tradition with the Japanese simplification that so much he liked. To delimit the objects he uses thick lines, dark, reaching this way a major volumetric effect. Van Gogh reinforces the vivacity of the color replacing the white color of the walls (in the originals) with a light blue, complementary one of orange and yellow predominant in the objects. The forms are outlined. The artist recovers the drawing and the expressiveness across the color and the drawing. The outlines are hard and angular. The stroke is tremendously doughy, thick, short and vigorous. It is necessary to remember that Van Gogh, sometimes, was applying the painting straight of the pipe, without mixing. Las formas están perfiladas. El artista recupera el dibujo y la expresividad a través del color y el dibujo. Los contornos son duros y angulosos. La pincelada es tremendamente pastosa, gruesa, corta y vigorosa. Hay que recordar que Van Gogh, a veces, aplicaba la pintura directamente del tubo, sin mezclar.
In the explanations that of the work it does to its brother, Van Gogh justifies the achievement of the work because he wants to express the calmness of the bedroom as place of rest as well as highlight the simplicity of the same all this by means of the symbolism of the colors. For it it describes: "the walls, lilac pale, the soil of a red worn-out and subdued one, the chairs and the bed of yellow, the pillow and the sheet of a lemon green very pale one, the blanket blood-red, the orange table of cleaning, the blue washbowl and the window in green color”. In this work there is seen a clear influence of the Japanese engravings and also like that it showed it in its letters: "the Japanese have lived in very simple interiors”.
With this work, finally, what Van Gogh does is to transmit to the spectator a sensation across the color and the line. The color is constituted in an expressive way. To Van Gogh what he is interested in on having painted this picture is the emotion that he wakes up in the spectator. Namely it prepares the way to the new tendencies as the movement will be an expressionist. It uses the color as an expression way, but a symbolic color, which will influence the fauvismo and, at the same time, expressionist will be an essential modality in the avant-garde. Utiliza el color como medio de expresión, pero un color simbólico, que influirá en el fauvismo y, al mismo tiempo, será un referente esencial en la vanguardia expresionista.
The room performs trapezoidal form with the wall of the fund where it places the window and a door to the right (for which one was gaining access to the stairs that rises to the loft). The door of the left was leading to the guests' room. It is the quarter that it prepared for Gauguin. Since one sees it is a modest accommodation, with rustic furniture, of pine wood: a bed, a clothes rack, two chairs, a wooden small table in the angle and a few pictures in the walls. Como se ve es un alojamiento modesto, con muebles rústicos, de madera de pino: una cama, un perchero, dos sillas, una mesilla de madera en el ángulo y unos cuadros en las paredes.
“This time treats simply the color as my bedroom, therefore, only must make everything … suggest rest or sleep in general. Anyway, the vision of the picture must make to rest the head, or rather, the imagination … the quadrature of the furniture must express the immobile rest.”
Letter of Vincent van Gogh to its brother Theo
Van Gogh was thinking that it was the best work realized during its stay in Arles.
This article is an extract and it belongs to the reportage on the fourth delivery of the Museum of Orsay that will be published in the Magazine Atticus in the number 7 and that it has like protagonist to the figure of Van Gogh. Magazine Atticus 7 will go out in the next days (beginning of July) and that it will be possible to unload in www.revistaatticus.es
The represented room is the bedroom that Vincent Van Gogh had in Arles in the number 2 of the Place Lamartine and that was in what it is known as “The Yellow House” during its stay in the year 1888 and 1889.
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