Dormitory in the Hospital in Arles

Van Gogh painted the dormitory of the Arles hospital in November 1888, during one of his periods of confinement following his breakdown of December 1888 — actually before the most acute crisis, during an earlier period of treatment after behavioral problems in the city. The long ward with its rows of iron beds, its red-tiled floor, its patients and nursing nuns creates one of the most intimate and unusual social observations in his work: the hospital as a social institution, a world of regulated human suffering and regulated care. He wrote to Theo that the dormitory had a peaceful, almost monastic quality that moved him, the order and care of the nursing contrasting with the emotional disorder that had brought him there. The composition's dramatic perspective — the tiled floor receding in strong diagonal lines toward the far end of the ward, the beds diminishing in scale, the figures placed at intervals like punctuation — is among his most architecturally ambitious treatments of interior space. The Museum Am Römerholz at Winterthur holds this alongside the Mackerel Still Life and the Courtyard of the Hospital, giving the Swiss institution an unusually coherent group of works from the institutional contexts of Van Gogh's final years.

The dramatic perspective recession of the red-tiled corridor creates powerful spatial depth. The warm orange-red of the floor is set against the cool white of the beds and walls. Figures are placed at intervals along the corridor, diminishing in scale toward the vanishing point at the far end of the ward.