4.9/5
Most bedrooms end up with the wrong painting for a simple reason: people shop for the living room and carry the leftover upstairs. A bedroom asks for something else. The painting there is the last thing you see before the lamp goes out and the first thing you see before the alarm does, and it has to be good company at both hours. So these bedroom painting ideas lean one way on purpose. They're quiet pictures, mostly flowers, water, fields and one very famous room, and every one of them sits among the calm garden and flower canvases people hang over a bed.
A quick word on what "restful" means here. It isn't about pale colors. Van Gogh's bedroom is loud yellow and red, and it's the most restful picture on this list. What matters is a clear shape the eye can settle on, not too many small incidents competing for attention, and a mood that still works under a warm lamp at night.
Twelve paintings to wake up to
1. Van Gogh's bedroom in Arles
Start with the painting that was made for exactly this job. In October 1888, in the Yellow House at Arles, Van Gogh painted the room he slept in: a plain wooden bed, two chairs, a small table with a jug, his own pictures on the wall. He furnished it himself and then painted it as a kind of instruction. Writing to Theo on 16 October 1888, he said looking at the painting should "rest the mind, or rather, the imagination".
He flattened the room on purpose and left out the shadows so it would read like a Japanese print. The odd angle of the back wall is real, too; the corner of that room was skewed. One thing surprises almost everyone: the walls and doors were purple once, and they read blue today because the paint has discolored over the years. I'd argue the fading made it calmer than he planned, which is fine by me for a room where you sleep. If you want the picture he meant to be looked at from a bed, this is it, and a hand-painted version of his Arles bedroom is the obvious first choice for the wall facing the pillow.
2. Almond Blossom
Van Gogh painted this in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in February 1890, as a present. His brother Theo and sister-in-law Jo had just had a son, Vincent Willem, named after him. Almond trees flower early, so the branch became a picture of new life, and he took the bold outlines and the way the tree sits in the frame from Japanese prints. The family kept it closer than any other work, and that baby grew up to found the museum where it hangs now.
It works in almost any bedroom: the blue is soft enough for a small room, the white blossom lifts a dark one, and there's no horizon to fight with the line of a headboard. It also makes a lovely nursery picture, which is where it started. Look at those blossoming branches against the blue and you'll see why it's the one people choose when they can't decide.
3. Monet's Water Lilies
Monet spent close to thirty years painting one pond at Giverny. In the later canvases he cut the bank and the sky away completely, so all you get is water, lily pads and the sky lying on the surface as a reflection. For a bedroom that's ideal. There's nothing to read, nowhere to go, only a slow drift of color.
He thought of these pictures as a gift of calm. The day after the Armistice of 11 November 1918, he offered the great pond panels to France as a symbol of peace, and they were installed in Paris in 1927, a few months after his death. A long horizontal format like one of the pond canvases with no horizon fits over a king or queen bed better than almost anything else.
4. Impression, Sunrise
In 1872 Monet stayed at a hotel in Le Havre and painted the outer harbor from his room at dawn. Cranes, smokestacks and masts dissolve into autumn mist; a small orange sun and its reflection were added at the end. He did it in a few hours. When he showed it in 1874 and had to give it a title, he called it Impression, and a hostile critic turned the word into a name for the whole group.
Why it suits a bedroom: it's mostly blue-grey fog, with one warm note. That's the palette of early morning, painted from his hotel window at the same hour you'd be looking at it. It's a small picture in real life, so don't blow it up to fill a huge wall.
5. Poppies near Argenteuil
Monet painted his field of wild poppies at Argenteuil in 1873. A woman with a parasol and a small boy walk down through the flowers; they're probably his wife Camille and their son Jean, and the same pair appears again higher up the slope. It was in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874.
The canvas splits into two zones, warm reds on one side and cool blue-greens on the other. If your bedroom faces north and feels cold, this is the one I'd pick. Red in a bedroom sounds like a bad idea, but here it's scattered dots in a lot of green, so it warms the room without shouting.
6. Irises
In May 1889 Van Gogh chose to enter the asylum at Saint-Rémy, and within the first week he began painting the irises in its garden. Every flower is different, bent and curled into its own shape, and the whole bed of them runs off the edges of the canvas. Theo sent it to the Salon des Indépendants that September and wrote to Vincent that it "strikes the eye from afar. It is a beautiful study full of air and life."
The original is on view at the Getty Center. In a bedroom it brings color without chaos: blue-violet and green, with one white iris that everyone's eye finds eventually.
7. Green Wheat Field with Cypress
Van Gogh painted wheat fields again and again in the south of France. This one is the gentle version: young green wheat, a single dark cypress, low hills and a pale sky. No harvest, no crows, no drama. It's the picture I'd suggest for someone who likes Van Gogh's brushwork but finds The Starry Night too much to sleep under.
8. Manet's Lilac in a Glass
Not every bedroom painting has to go over the bed. Manet's small flower pieces are made for the wall beside a mirror or above a dresser. A few stems of lilac stand in a plain glass of water, and he paints the glass and the water with a handful of quick strokes. Up close it's loose; from across the room it looks exact. A copy of his lilac still life at close to the original's modest scale looks right on a narrow wall where a big canvas would crowd you.
9. Fantin-Latour's roses
Henri Fantin-Latour painted roses the way other people keep a diary: often, and with great care. His bouquets sit against plain, quiet backgrounds with nothing else in the picture, which is exactly why they work in bedrooms. His white and yellow roses in a tall vase suit a vertical spot, the strip of wall between a window and a corner, or a pair of nightstands with a gap between them.
10. Caillebotte's chrysanthemums
Gustave Caillebotte was a keen gardener, and in his White and Yellow Chrysanthemums the flowers fill the canvas from edge to edge. There's no vase, no table, no sky. It reads almost like a patterned textile, which makes it a good match for a bedroom with plain bedding and not much else on the walls.
11. The Kiss
For a couple's bedroom this is the classic, and for once the classic earns it. Klimt painted it in 1908–1909, and it was shown at the Kunstschau in Vienna in 1908, where the Austrian ministry bought it while the show was still open. The gold came from Byzantine mosaics he'd seen at Ravenna in 1903. Two figures fold into one shape on a flowered ledge; there's no background story, only the embrace.
A warning about the gold: in daylight it can look loud. Under a bedside lamp at night it glows, which is when you'll mostly see it. The original is square, so choose a square wall space for it.
12. The Starry Night, with a caveat
I'm including it because it's a night picture, and because so many people love it. In a letter from Saint-Rémy in early June 1889, Van Gogh told Theo what he saw before sunrise from his window: "nothing but the morning star, which looked very big." The painting is dark blue and deeply calm in its color. The caveat is the sky itself, which swirls. Some people find it soothing to fall asleep under; others lie awake following the spirals. If you're the second kind, hang it where you see it from the door, not from the pillow.
Where it goes and how big
There are really two walls in a bedroom. The one over the headboard is the one guests see. The one opposite the bed is the one you see, every night and every morning, and it's where a painting does most of its work. If you only have one good painting, put it there.
Over the bed, go horizontal and keep it a little narrower than the headboard, so the painting and the bed read as one piece. Leave a clear gap above the headboard so you don't knock the frame when you sit up to read. Water Lilies, Almond Blossom and the Arles bedroom all sit well there. Vertical pictures like the Fantin-Latour roses belong on narrow walls or between two windows.
In a small room, one painting beats a gallery wall. Six frames around a bed look busy in daylight and chaotic in lamplight.
Matching the painting to the room you have
- Dark or north-facing rooms: the warm ones, the poppies at Argenteuil or the orange sun over Le Havre.
- Bright rooms with a lot of daylight: the cool ones, Almond Blossom and Water Lilies, which calm the light down.
- Shared rooms where two people disagree: Water Lilies. It's hard to find anyone who objects to it.
- Guest rooms: Irises or the Caillebotte chrysanthemums, colorful enough to feel welcoming, neutral enough for anyone.
And if none of these twelve is quite right, the next place to look is among the paintings people already know by name, since a picture you recognize tends to feel settled on a wall from day one.
Having one painted for your bedroom
Each of the twelve paintings above can be ordered from Art & See as an oil reproduction painted by hand on canvas, not printed. If you'd like to compare them side by side, or find something in the same quiet key that isn't on this list, browse every flower, garden and field painting chosen for bedrooms and pick the one you'd like to see first thing in the morning.
