This painting depicts Van Gogh’s bedroom in the “Yellow House” in Arles where he set up his studio and resided starting in September 1888 (the building was destroyed during Allied bombardment in June 1944). Van Gogh painted the first version in October 1888, while he was waiting for the arrival of Paul Gauguin in Arles with whom he hoped to set up an artists’ colony

The room is not rectangular but trapezoidal, which explains why the wall with the window recedes from left to right. In a letter to his brother Théo dated October 16, 1888, Van Gogh outlined his composition ideas:

This time it is simply my bedroom, but here the color has to do the job by giving, through its simplification, a grander style to the objects, being suggestive here of rest and dream in general. The walls are in pale violet. The floor with red tiles. The wood of the bed and the chairs are in fresh butter yellow, the sheet and the pillows in very bright lemon green. The blanket scarlet red. The window green. The dressing table orange, the basin blue. The doors lilac …… The shadows and cast shadows are suppressed, it is colored in flat and plain tints like Japanese prints

After the first version of Bedroom in Arles was damaged in a flood of the Rhône, Théo asked Van Gogh to make a copy before the original was to be restored. The second version was painted in 1889 (in which Van Gogh did not seek to make an exact copy of the original) and is today exhibited in the Art Institute of Chicago

In the same year, Van Gogh decided to create smaller versions of his own favorite works. Among these is the third version of Bedroom in Arles, which he gave to his sister Wilhelmina. The painting was acquired in the 1920’s by Japanese industrialist Matsukata Kojiro (whose collection of French art became the core part of the Museum of Western Art in Tokyo)

During World War II, the Free French government sequestered all assets belonging to enemy states, a policy applicable to the works of art owned by Matsukata located in France, among which was the Bedroom in Arles. Finally in 1959 and subsequent to a settlement between France and Japan, the third version of Bedroom in Arles entered the French national collection and is today exhibited at the Musée d'Orsay