The bed featured in Vincent van Gogh’s The Bedroom, may have found its way from France to the Netherlands, broadcaster NOS reported this weekend.

Van Gogh purchased the bed in Arles where he painted some of his most celebrated works. The bed, thought to have ended up on a rubbish tip after the painter died in 1890, makes a surprise appearance in a letter written by a nephew of the painter in 1937 where it caught the eye of Van Gogh expert Martin Bailey.

In the letter Vincent Willem van Gogh offers the bed to someone in Arles who wants to turn the house the painter lived in into a museum.

Bailey, who is writing a book about Van Gogh’s life in Arles, followed the trail back to the house of Van Gogh’s relatives in Laren where the bed stood until 1945.

Van Gogh’s nephew Johan van Gogh, then aged 93 told Bailey he remembered the bed in store in his family’s cellar. In 1945, he said, his father had donated the bed to victims of the war who lived ‘somewhere in the Arnhem area’ in the eastern Netherlands. Further research revealed that to be Boxmeer.

It is unclear what happened to it after that. Nevertheless, the hunt is now on in Boxmeer to try to trace the bed. ‘It is a wonderful story,’ the town’s mayor told local broadcaster Omroep Brabant. ‘But I can say it is not in my attic.’

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