Interior (The Artist's Bedroom)

This bedroom scene documents the spartan accommodations of the young and struggling Expressionist artist Ludwig Meidner shortly after he arrived in Berlin, penniless and little known. The lineage of such interior views lies in the genre of room paintings in German culture in the first half of the nineteenth century and the famous Dutch Post-Impressionist Vincent van Gogh. Although these scenes were usually unpopulated, as in Meidner’s composition, such architectural interiors functioned as portraits, characterizing their occupants through the careful inclusion of their possessions.

Late in life, long after Meidner had become a successful artist, he described the lonesome and hungry life he had endured around the time he painted Interior with passionate zeal: "I had faith in a magnificent future. I had made a home for myself under a blistering hot slate roof, in a cheap studio with an iron bedstead, a mirror, and a number of boxes that served as tables and closets, and on one of which there wobbled a spirit burner with a pot in which lentils, white beans, or potatoes simmered."