Vincent van Gogh, Bedroom in Arles

Location of Van Gogh’s bedroom in the house at 2, Place Lamartine in Arles. He painted this house as the “Yellow House” and this painting is shown below.

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Vincent van Gogh, The Yellow House
Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam

Vincent van Gogh, Bedroom in Arles, Art Institute Chicago, 1889

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Vincent van Gogh, Bedroom in Arles, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 1889

This pigment analysis is based on the work of Johanna Salvant (1)

1 Green windows: emerald green
2 The dark frame of the mirror: Prussian blue

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3 Pale yellow pillows and bedsheets: chrome yellow with an admixture of zinc white, cobalt blue, and artificial ultramarine
4 Dark red bead spread: vermilion
5 Yellow bed: chrome yellow

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6 Blue walls and doors: Both the walls and doors were initially of a distinct violet colour and were painted in cobalt blue with mixed in carmine cochineal lake. Carmine is quite unstable and it was destroyed with time, so the paint layer appears blue.

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7 Orange-red table: red lead with other pigments

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8 Floor: The paint layer contains carmine (cochineal) lake and geranium (eosine) lake and traces of indigo. The colour of the floor has shifted towards blue as well due to the fading of the red lake pigments.

References

(1) J. Salvant, A comparative study of Vincent van Gogh’s Bedroom series, The National Gallery Technical Bulletin 30th Anniversary Conference Postprints, 2011

This documentary, produced by the Art Institute, details how conservators and scientists have been able to solve long-standing mysteries about Vincent Van Gogh’s three Bedroom paintings.

(1) J. Salvant, A comparative study of Vincent van Gogh’s Bedroom series, The National Gallery Technical Bulletin 30th Anniversary Conference Postprints, 2011