Cut to the chaise

As someone who’s been brought low by museum fatigue on more than one occasion, including a near-fatal bout at Versailles, I couldn’t help notice the daybed in which Archibald finalist Sean Layh has placed a reclining Jacob Collins, in his Packing Room Prize-winning portrait.

‘Shove over,’ I imagined asking him, while gathering all the cushions in the foreground to place between myself and the semi-naked actor, depicted as a tormented Hamlet.

While it can often be difficult to find somewhere to sit in a museum, beds such as this one are altogether more common on the walls. A similar chaise longue appears in the 19th-century painting Layh has referenced, Albert Maignan’s The last moments of Chlodobert 1880, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria. It’s also occupied by a troubled soul who, as its title suggests, is not long for this world.

Chlodobert, the young son of Frankish rulers King Chilperic I and Queen Fredegung, is about to die of dysentery. Two of his distant relatives, who appear in bed in Évariste Vital Luminais’ The sons of Clovis II 1880, long an Art Gallery of New South Wales highlight, were not so lucky. Chlothar and Chideric instead had their hamstrings severed on the orders of their mother, who then cast them adrift on the Seine.

The unfortunate brothers are from a later generation of the same medieval dynasty that became a favourite subject of Victorian painters such as Maignan and Luminais, who was at one time Maignan’s teacher. The last moments of Chlodobert and The sons of Clovis II were completed in the same year. Unlike Chlodobert, the brothers Chlothar and Chideric survive, albeit with plenty to unpack with their therapists.

The trials of parenting only await the couple in the bedroom scene in Gaston La Touche’s The first born 1887, which also hangs in the Grand Courts. The new mother is resting. The new father sits at the foot of the bed, rendered immobile by shock and avoiding eye contact with his mother-in-law who sits at the window. Everybody looks exhausted, as if the occupant of the crib in the middle of the room has only just arrived, or they’ve all just got home from a museum.

Thankfully, not everyone depicted by artists in bed looks like they’re dead, dying or a new parent. Not everyone even looks human. Think of the couple in Bonita Ely’s At home with the Locust People (Itchy feet) 1974–75 in the 20th-century galleries in Naala Nura. They look like locusts. Back in the Grand Courts, Ron Mueck’s Old woman in bed 2000, 2002, looks real. Too real. Only smaller. Édouard Manet’s naked Olympia (published plate) 1865 looks bored. And cold.

The Art Gallery’s etching of Olympia is a reproduction of the 1863 painting found at the Musee d’Orsay, which caused a scandal when exhibited at the Salon of 1865. Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn did something similar 200 years earlier with his not-safe-for-work etching The French Bed 1646, a print of which travelled to the Art Gallery from the Rijksmuseum in 2017. I’ll spare you the details. Let’s just say the couple in Rembrandt’s four-poster are doing what the young couple in La Touche’s painting once did to put themselves in their current situation.

One of the art world’s most scandalous beds belongs to our own age, however. The detritus found around the base of then-Turner Prize finalist Tracey Emin’s My Bed 1998 – cigarette butts, condoms, vodka bottles – suggests the previous occupants at least took precautions. ‘Stomach turner’ a UK tabloid headline howled at the time.

Reviled by some, revered by others, My Bed has since become akin to the Mona Lisa, but in manchester – instantly recognisable. A portrait of the artist (now Dame Tracey Emin) as a young slob, it is also a portrait of depression and despair, of raw emotion – not unlike The sons of Clovis II, which Emin spoke about to director of collections Wayne Tunnicliffe and an Art After Hours audience in 2018. It is ‘one of my most favourite paintings in the entire universe’, she said. ‘Every time I stand in front of that painting I want to get on my knees and cry. I want to hug that painting. I just love it.’

The artist went on to describe the work as ‘strong’, ‘hardcore’, ‘amazing’ and (this is where she lost me, reader) ‘somehow so sexy’.

Emin herself has said that one of the strengths of My Bed is ‘the sense that someone has just got out of it’. Absence is also a feature of Mikala Dwyer’s sculptural Possession 2015, on display on lower level 2 of Naala Badu, in which the bed has been stripped of everything but its frame. Jannis Kounellis’s collection work Untitled 1984/87, most recently on display in Making Worlds, is also a bed stripped bare, but with a burning gas flame, steel panels and more attached.

The curatorial notes online for Kounellis’s work point out that the bed frame, ‘is formed to exactly fit a sleeping body. It is the place where we are conceived and born, where we dream, where we make love and with luck where we die’.

It’s the place where artists such as Henri Matisse and Frida Kahlo, forced to turn their bedrooms into studios, made art. Where art-lovers rest for as long as possible, after getting home from being with it.

Somewhere, Hamlet uttered, ‘To die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance to dream: aye there’s the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come.’

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John Saxby is a Sydney-based writer and editor, and the former editor of Look

See the Archibald Prize 2026 as it tours the regions. View the exhibition at Shepparton Art Museum until 1 November, then Bank Art Museum Moree 13 November – 19 December.