Vincent van Gogh painted his own bedroom more than once, and the walls in this version are not quite the color he actually mixed. Look closely and the room reads as pale blue today — but Van Gogh himself described it differently in a letter to his brother Theo.
What you're looking at
This is Van Gogh's bedroom in the Yellow House in Arles, France, painted in 1889. It's a small, plain room: a narrow bed, two chairs, a washstand, a few pictures on the wall. Nothing about the furniture is fancy. What makes the painting striking is the color and the tilted, slightly off-kilter perspective, as if the whole room is leaning toward you.
The color that isn't there anymore
In a letter to Theo, Van Gogh listed the colors of this exact room, wall by wall: "the walls pale lilac... the floor a broken and faded red." That lilac violet is the color he actually painted onto the canvas. But the red pigment inside his violet mix was chemically unstable, and over about 130 years it faded out of the paint, leaving the walls looking blue instead of lilac. Conservation scientists at the Art Institute of Chicago, which holds this version of the painting, confirmed the fading by comparing the visible canvas to paint that had been protected under the edge of the frame — and that hidden strip is still violet today.
So the painting you see now and the painting Van Gogh actually made are, technically, two different colors of the same room. It's a rare case where a museum can show you, with real evidence, exactly how a painting has changed since the artist put down his brush.
One detail to look for
If you ever see a high-resolution scan or visit the painting in person, look at the very edge of the canvas, right where the frame would have sat. That thin protected strip is the closest thing left to the lilac Van Gogh actually saw and named in his letter — a small window back into 1889.
See it at its real size
Our canvas print of The Bedroom is labeled against the true size of the original — 73.6 x 92.3 cm — so what you're hanging is honestly scaled to the painting Van Gogh made, not a poster-sized guess. Shop the canvas print.