Empty beds, hospital beds, surgical beds, dishevelled beds in an artist's studio, homely beds with patchwork quilts. Beds appear everywhere in the artworks of twentieth- and twenty-first-century British artists, and in those working long before that too.
Occasionally, as with many works by Lucian Freud, the bed is simply the representation of a 'prop'-like item from the artist's studio which, in many ways, acts like a blank canvas or plinth on which to position the model. But in many others, it is a key part of the artwork's narrative or meaning. Often in art, the bed is not something a person needs to get up and out of for things to happen to them – as we imply when associating 'sleeping in' or 'lying in bed' with laziness.
In still other cases, such as Rachel Whiteread's Untitled (Air Bed II) (1992) sculpture, the bed itself gains central significance, assuming an eerie aura where the absence of people using the item is clearly felt.
Similarly, Tracey Emin's Turner-nominated installation My Bed (1999) isolated the artist's own bed and its surrounding debris following a four-day stint in bed as a result of a mental breakdown. The collection of objects – dirty slippers, vodka bottles, cigarettes and KY jelly – revealed deeply personal information about the artist, despite Emin removing herself from the work entirely.
Emin has frequently continued to use beds within her work – they were, for example, a prominent feature of her recent White Cube exhibition 'I followed you to the end' – and she is a great example of an artist who uses them as a site of seismic life events, from mental health crises to sexual encounters and prolonged periods of sickness and recovery. Indeed, beds in the works of many artists often perform this function. They are the location of milestone occurrences that take us from cradle to grave, with passages of love, sickness and sleep in between.
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Childbirth and child-rearing
One of the most widely recognisable historic British paintings prominently featuring a bed is The Cholmondeley Ladies, a Tudor portrait by an unknown artist. The picture is traditionally said to show sisters – quite possibly twins – who were born on the same day, married on the same day, and both hold newborn babies in christening gowns. The fully dressed state of the women (and their children) is curiously at odds with them being depicted as 'in bed', but in spite – or perhaps because of that – it highlights the symbolic use of a bed as a site of childbirth and early childrearing.
In much more modern times, artists have included beds in images that explicitly explore childbirth and its aftermath in various forms. Frank Bowling, the Guyanese-born British artist, started painting images of childbirth after becoming – by his own admission – obsessed with the subject following an event in which he helped a lone neighbour give birth before medical assistance arrived.
The 1962 painting, Birthday, shows a blurred and largely unclothed woman in the throes of giving birth on a white bed. The view through an open window directs the audience's gaze to the centre of her open legs and, above that, the dome of her belly and swollen breasts.
Notably, there isn't a midwife or other helper present and the sanguine-coloured walls behind the bed act as an uncomfortable echo of the bloody, bodily event taking place in the room.
In stark contrast, Dawn by Bernard Dunstan captures a mother breastfeeding a young infant while propped up in bed in the early hours of the morning. The limited light from between the open curtains floods the room with a blue tint which coats the walls and infuses the bedding and pillowcase. Although the mother appears tired, the image is imbued with a sense of calm and a stillness that underpins the intimacy of this shared moment.
The scene is underwritten with a desire to demonstrate realism: the tedium and exhaustion of the early morning feeds and the mundane domestic items that accumulate in a house with newborn children. But it also has an idealistic, almost nostalgic, quality in how it seeks to chronicle the transient beauty of the early maternal bond.
Contemporary artist Caroline Walker, who specialises in images of overlooked, female-centric existence, painted a series of works relating to childbirth while resident at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Maternity Wing of University College London Hospitals in 2021. One of these paintings, Theatre, shows a new mother in the moments following a caesarean birth. Here, two different beds are shown: one is the wheeled hospital cot the baby is about to be placed in following its newborn checks and the other is the surgical bed the mother is lying upon.
Despite the sterile medical setting and the separation of mother and baby, there is a tranquillity to the scene in how the female medics perform their tasks with almost choreographed synchronicity. There is also, as with many of Walker's scenes, a quiet radicalism in how it normalises a common, but often hidden, experience of birth, recognising the magic within the mundane.
Sex and love
The history of British and European art is littered with examples of nudes, often posed on beds. But while an unclothed figure on a bed might seem like it always carries sexual overtones, this doesn't have to be the case. The extensive works of Freud, for example, who often positioned his nude models on the bed in his studio – as with Naked Girl with Egg (1980–1981) – frequently feel too coldly clinical and dissociative to be erotic.
In contrast, Duncan Grant's Nude (c.1925) has much stronger sexual emotions. The model, although artificially posed, looks sleepily relaxed hinting at a post-coital subtext. The dishevelled bedding and eclectic mix of soft pillows add to the home-spun attitude. This could, just about plausibly, be a depiction of a genuine domestic scene were the model not positioned in such a contrived manner.
Walter Sickert, painting across the start of the twentieth century, deliberately did away with these types of streamlined, beautified poses when painting nude women on beds. La Hollandaise (c.1906) is named after a fictional prostitute – a reference point with obvious sexual connections. The foreshortened figure on the bed within a dark, depressing-looking room, has voyeuristic qualities. Sickert's painting, in spite of its earthy realism, also hints at a deep discomfort with sex and a juvenile perspective that is simultaneously mesmerised and terrified by the figure of the sex worker.
An example of a female perspective of sex involving a bed can be found in Sarah Lucas's Beyond the Pleasure Principle [Freud] (2000). The sculpture places sex and death in close proximity, with a cardboard coffin positioned behind a hanging, impaled mattress. The female torso is suggested via a coat hanger with dangling lights in place of breasts, while a large freestanding coat rack adds a note of unadorned domestic life.
Through the title of the work, Lucas addresses one of the most famous male-led theories of sexuality, but the artwork itself gently pokes fun, representing both the profound side of sex – as an antidote to death – and the silliness in how bodies and desire are typically depicted.
Convalescence and sickness
Along with being sites of birth, creation and recreation, beds are also the location of long-term illness and recovery. Some of the most powerful examples of this come from images of hospital wards, where the endless rows of beds containing patients emphasise the drawn-out process of ill-health and its universality.
New Arrivals: F4 Ward, No. 36 Stationary Hospital, Mahemdia, Sinai
c.1918
Gilbert Spencer (1892–1979)
Margaret Lindsay Williams' Care of Wounded Soldiers at Cardiff Royal Infirmary during the Great War (1916) shows a wounded soldier being assessed by a team of superiors. The ward nurse who tends to his head bandage does so with great care and familiarity, demonstrating the regular attention she gives to patients like this one.
Care of Wounded Soldiers at Cardiff Royal Infirmary during the Great War
1916
Margaret Lindsay Williams (1888–1960)
In this way, Williams' oil painting captures the widespread tragedy of the First World War – the injury and death of countless young men – but also the heroic goodness of those, like the nurse, who cared for them. In this regard, a comparison can be made with Caroline Walker's works in how the regular routines of medical staff are elevated to something deserving of great admiration.
Other artists have moved away from the shared experience of the hospital ward and instead focused on the individual patient, sometimes within the home. The Doctor's Visit (2000) by Paul Reid shows a stricken-looking woman propped up by a large white cushion in bed while a male physician in a dark suit attends to her. In his hand is a small white cup, probably containing medicines she is either about to ingest or has just taken.
The intensity of the look passing between the two characters suggests news which is less than soothing. The large book on the nightstand hints at a long period already spent bedbound and the grey-brown colour scheme of the painting reinforces ideas of decay and stasis.
Contemporary artist Laura Footes, meanwhile, upends the tradition of showing patients as separate from the artist by offering a first-person perspective on long-term illness. The artist, who lives with a chronic condition, frequently returns to the motif of a bed.
A Soothing Chill
2024, oil on canvas by Laura Footes (b.1988)
She also repeatedly includes ghost-like figures alongside more solidly human forms, as seen in A Soothing Chill, currently on show at Carl Freedman Gallery as part of her exhibition 'A Healing Dream'. This interlinking of the spiritual and tangible worlds can be read as the coexistence of aliveness and death which, in turn, suggests that perhaps long-term illness is either a state midway between these two poles of being, or that it mentally connects the sufferer to the deceased with greater sensitivity.
Death and the afterlife
Closely related to scenes of illness and recuperation are those depicting death. These literal deathbed scenes include Henry Wallis's famous The Death of Chatterton (1856–1858), which shows the poet Thomas Chatterton who ended his life by consuming arsenic at age 17. The Victorians, including Pre-Raphaelite painters like Wallis, were especially interested in death, but more recent artists working across genres have also explored the topic extensively.
The Scottish artist John Bellany had a long-running interest in depicting death and ill health, probably due to his own ongoing health battles. The Gates of Death (1969) is an early work that combines the symbolic with the realistic and has echoes of Edvard Munch. A red-headed figure sits up in a bed where the duvet is shapeshifting into a lava-like pool of melting stripes. Behind them are three alarmed-looking nuns, plus two owls on the bed posts which recall how these birds have an extensive cross-cultural association with death.
The sickly yellow walls and the pooling, voluminous bedding evoke the experience of a high fever. The nuns, who don't seem to be assisting much, and the owls have hallucinatory qualities and the title – which has strong echoes of 'the gates of hell' – all combine to suggest a terrifying and not peaceful end to earthly existence.
Another, very different, painting to combine elements of the supernatural with realism is Graham Edward Cross's Mr and Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard. Painted at an unknown date – Cross was born in 1935 – the painting is based on a character from Dylan Thomas's play Under Milk Wood.
In the picture, Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard wears a fresh apron and pulls back the curtains to let the morning sunlight in. On one side of the clean-looking room sits a large tabby cat with its ears squashed down – hinting at alarm – and on the other lie two men in identical striped pyjamas in a basic bed, a small patchwork quilt spread out over them.
The two men are Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard's deceased husbands, but the painting shows them as though they could be asleep. The subject matter, once understood, could be read as disturbing or macabre. But the composition's focus on a new dawn, and the rolled-up-sleeve work ethic of Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard edges the viewer towards a different conclusion. Here, death is not something that brings about a complete ending, but an entry into a new way of being where the living carry with them the important loved ones who have died. In this sense, Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, whether re-married or alone once more, will always have someone with whom to share her bed.
Rosemary Waugh, art critic and journalist
'Laura Footes: A Healing Dream – Curated by Tracey Emin DBE RA' is at Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, until 16th February 2025
This content was supported by Jerwood Foundation