Van Gogh wrote down the colour list for The Bedroom

Writing to his brother Theo in October 1888, Van Gogh set out what The Bedroom was going to be, colour by colour: pale violet walls, red tiles, butter-yellow bed and chairs, lemon-green sheets, blood-red blanket, orange washstand, blue basin, green window.

He also said what it was for. The colour was to suggest rest. Everything was to be flat and unshaded, with no cast shadows anywhere — which he had taken directly from the Japanese prints he had been collecting for two years.

Why the room will not sit still

Read that list and then look at the painting, and the odd thing is that it does not feel restful at all. The floor tilts up. The bed pushes towards you. The far wall leans.

Some of that is the actual room, which was a trapezoid. Most of it is him. Nothing recedes the way perspective says it should, and the furniture crowds forward.

Three versions

He painted it three times. The first was damaged by flooding in 1889 while he was at Saint-Rémy, which is why the other two exist. The pictures hanging over the bed change between versions — they are his own paintings, and which ones he chose to hang is a small, deliberate edit each time.