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We have talked about big art galleries with lots of people and lots of paintings hung on the walls in ornate frames.

National Gallery Victoria, Melbourne, Australia

But to understand why art is important to you, we need to think about a place that sounds like the complete opposite of an art gallery:

Think about your ideal bedroom.

Imagine you’ve got a new bedroom and you can put anything on the walls. It’s just for you — no one is going to complain or say you can’t do something or that anything is silly. It’s your space. It’s totally up to you. What would you put up?

Maybe some things like these:

You put up posters because you like looking at them and they show things that mean a lot to you. Your room is an exciting and important place: all around you are lots of reminders of the things you love. It might be, for you, the nicest room in the world.

You might think your room is very different from a museum*:

* Normally this gallery is packed with silent adults. It’s got a strange name, the Uffizi, which means ‘the offices’ because a long time ago it was built above the offices of a bank. You have to queue for hours just to get in. It’s in a city in Italy called Florence. People travel from all round the world just to visit.

The Tribuna in the Uffizi gallery, Florence, Italy

Compare this to your room. You have just got some posters stuck up with pins or Blu-Tack, and the gallery has pictures that are hundreds of years old in golden frames. Your room has a bed in it, but this place has marble statues instead — and there’s definitely nowhere to hang your clothes.

But in an important way your ideal room and the gallery are the same.

Works of art are really just special posters that other people have wanted to put in their rooms. And your room is really a private version of a gallery.

This isn’t so odd: Some galleries actually started out as other people’s special rooms.*

* The person who lived here liked having breakfast in this room. But you can’t eat a slice of toast in it these days because it’s been turned into an art gallery.

Sir John Soane’s Museum, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London

In 1813, an architect called John Soane reorganised this room, in his home in London. It was his favourite room in the house. He hung all his favourite paintings and drawings on the walls and he put his favourite books in the bookcase. There are interesting shells he collected in the room, too, because he liked their shapes and colours, and there are models of buildings he liked.

It would be funny if he could come back to life (he died in 1837) and see people visiting his special room. They’d be quietly admiring the works of art and he’d be thinking:

That’s where I left that book, I’ve been looking for it for about two hundred years!

Or he’d see a small stain on the carpet and remember that one morning a friend of his knocked over a cup of tea.

For him, everything in the room would have a very personal meaning: a little drawing of a place he liked to go on holiday, or of somewhere he wanted to go but never got the chance to visit (Soane dreamt of going to Egypt but it was extremely difficult to travel there while he was alive); some books with illustrations in them that he loved looking at; a special fossil he picked up while out for a walk.

Even if an art gallery did not actually begin as someone’s house, a lot of the art on the walls really did start out as things people had in their own rooms.

This picture was a special poster for the King’s bedroom*:

* The man on the horse is King Charles I of England. The picture was painted by his friend, Anthony van Dyck, in 1633. Sometimes the King rode his horse right into his palace. He was the King, so no one could say ‘Charles, I’ve told you before, don’t ride your horse in the house, you’ll get mud all over the carpet!’

Anthony Van Dyck, Charles I (1600–1649) with M. de St Antoine, 1633

Because he was a king he didn’t buy a poster in a shop, he got a famous artist to make one especially for him — and he needed a huge room too, because the picture is about 3.5 metres high.

In the same way as King Charles had an enormous and very expensive poster of himself in his room, other people might have had special posters of their relatives hung in their rooms — just like your gran might like to have a picture of you when you were little in her room (or maybe just in the living room).*

* This little girl was called Clarissa. Her parents had to move far away, so they had this picture painted so that Clarissa’s aunts and uncles could see what she looked like. It was painted nearly five hundred years ago by the most famous artist in the world at that time, a man called Titian.

Titian, Clarissa Strozzi (1540-1581), 1542

Or maybe, instead of admiring musicians or tennis stars and having posters of them on their walls, someone might have been really interested in ancient Greek and Roman stories (in the past these were people’s favourite stories). In this case, they would ask someone to paint them a picture of the most exciting bit in the story.*

* In the past, some of the most loved stories in the world were about a man called Ulysses. This picture is about when Ulysses and his friends land on an island. It seems great, but it’s actually inhabited by giants. One of them captures them and keeps them in his cave. They think they’ve had it, but Ulysses comes up with a clever plan. The giant has sheep that sleep in the cave. When he lets them out in the morning, Ulysses and his friends hide amongst the flock. They run back to their boat, but the giant realises they’ve escaped. He throws rocks at them as they row away (you can just about see the giant’s head and shoulders emerging behind the hill) but they miss the ship. The giant shouts out to Ulysses: ‘What’s your name?’ And Ulysses, thinking fast, shouts in reply ‘I’m nobody.’ The giant is pretty stupid and calls out to the other giants ‘Help! Nobody is escaping!’ Of course the other giants don’t come to help — since nobody is escaping. Ulysses and his friends are safe and they head off to their next exciting adventure.

JMW Turner, Ulysses deriding Polyphemus, 1829

People made their own posters, too. This one is by Vincent van Gogh, a famous painter who lived in the 19th century. It’s a picture of one of his friends, Eugène Boch.*

* Eugène’s family owned a factory and they were very wealthy. His sister, Anna, was a painter, and they got on well. He was friends with lots of artists, and he used to help them if they were short of money (which they often were). One of his best friends was the artist Vincent van Gogh, who painted this picture.

Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Eugène Boch, 1888

After Vincent van Gogh created this poster, he hung it in his bedroom.* And then he made another poster — of his bedroom with this poster in it! Here it is:

* This was van Gogh’s bedroom when he was living in Arles in France. He liked it so much he painted several paintings of it. This is the first one he did in 1888.

Vincent van Gogh, Bedroom, 1888

You can just about see the picture of his friend Eugène, in his yellow jacket, above the bed. It would be amazing if Vincent had hung this picture of his bedroom in his bedroom and then made another picture of that, and hung that picture in his bedroom, and then made a poster of that, and hung that poster in his bedroom and then… but we’ll make our heads hurt if we think about this too much.

In around 1660, the English artist Mary Beale wanted a picture of her son Bartholomew*, so she made one herself.

* Bartholomew was about five when his mother painted him. They were living in London at the time, but later Mary made money from selling her paintings and the family moved to a nice house in the countryside. When he grew up Bartholomew became a doctor.

Mary Beale, Sketch of the Artist’s Son, Bartholomew Beale, Facing Left, c. 1660

She made the picture because she knew that one day her son would grow up and change — he’d still be nice, but he would be different, and she wanted to remember what he looked like when he was little. It would be nice for him, too. This is because in those days, unless someone painted a picture of you when you were small (which was very rare) you’d actually never know what you had looked like.

Today, all these special ‘posters’ are in galleries or museums where many people can see them.

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

But they started out just as things that other people wanted in their own rooms.

Just by being interested in decorating your bedroom, you’re already connected with the people who have loved art in the past. They were selecting posters for their room, in the same way you might select posters for yours. So there’s some very important questions you can ask about any work of art:

Why did someone want to have this picture in their room?

What did they like about it, and why?

Why was it nice for them to have it around all the time?