00:26Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch post-impressionist painter whose work had far-reaching influence on the 20th century art.
00:36His output includes portraits, self-portraits, landscapes, still lifes, olive trees and cypresses, wheat fields and sunflowers.
00:47Critics largely ignored his work until after his presumed suicide in 1890.
00:53His shortened life, highly expressive and spontaneous use of vivid colors, broad oil brush strokes and emotive subject matter mean he is recognizable both in the modern public imagination, by his first name as the quintessential misunderstood genius, and by art historians as a supreme and pivotal aestheticist.
01:16Vincent van Gogh's three versions of this composition are the only record he made of the interior of the Yellow House, where he lived while he was in Arles in the south of France.
01:30The house embodied the artist's dream of a studio of the south, a community of like-minded artists working in harmony to create art for the future.
01:42Vincent van Gogh
01:43The first version of the bedroom was one of the paintings van Gogh made to decorate the house in anticipation of the arrival of his first guest, Paul Gaugher.
01:54It's just simply my bedroom, he wrote.
01:57Only here color is to do everything, to be suggestive here of rest or of sleep in general.
02:04In a word, looking at the picture ought to rest the brain, or rather the imagination.
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