On Your Bedroom Wall - Van Gogh at the National Gallery (X)

It seems the perfect way to close my Van Gogh at the National Gallery series with The Bedroom at Arles. It’s a painting that is all about the wood. Those two slightly wonky chairs, the loaded table, the window frame and the floor, and best of all, that amazing bed. I must have spent a good fifteen minutes gazing at the footboard - is that the opposite of headboard? - of this glorious depiction of a piece of furniture. The way that the thick, heavy mustard coloured paint is applied, and how it tactilely suggests the grain, almost wills you to reach out and touch.

 

Van Gogh, The Bedroom at Arles (1888)

However, it’s not just because it’s a wonderful and engaging painting that has led me to closing with The Bedroom. It is because it brings to mind the question that I always ask when leaving a much loved exhibition: if you could hang any one of these paintings on your bedroom wall, which would you choose? Van Gogh himself thinks long and hard about this. The paintings depicted above the bed are his own, including his 1888 Self Portrait which was placed next to The Bedroom at this exhibition. This means that I can at last ask this without coming across as overly trivial or, even worse, obsessed with possessions.  

Van Gogh, Self Portrait (1888)

 

Obviously, the paintings that I have already written about lead the way in my thinking. That said, perhaps my favourite painting in the exhibition, The Sower, can be discarded. Whilst I would never tire of it, its mood is perhaps too elegiac to live with. And I certainly don’t have the nerves to cope with the terrifying Green Vineyard, particularly if I find myself a little too deep in my sickbed. Portraits, whilst being one of my favourite genres in art, have too much of a presence - imagine having to live with Patience Escalier’s eyes boring into you twenty-four-seven? What about Starry Night Over the Rhône then? The joy of being able to see this without the crowds bunching around it. What bliss! Or maybe not. Whilst I adore this nocturne, I think living with it would be like eating too much cake.

Van Gogh, Landscape with a Ploughman (1888)

For me it comes down to The Garden at the Asylum at Saint-Rémy or Landscape with a Ploughman. If I’m allowed both, I’d have the former hanging in winter to conjure up spring and summer, and the latter in summer to take the sting out of the day. And if push comes to shove … I’ll favour the garden. I adore the bench under the trees.

Van Gogh, The Garden at the Asylum at Saint-Rémy (1889)

 

So, which Van Gogh - and you are allowed to choose from outside this exhibition (it’s not that any of us will ever get to realise our wish) - would you hang on your bedroom wall and why?