Silla con pipa

An empty rush-seated chair, a pipe and a pouch of tobacco: with almost nothing, Van Gogh painted one of the most personal portraits ever made, without a single face in it.

The story behind the painting

In May 1888 Van Gogh, living in Arles in the south of France, rented the Yellow House at 2 place Lamartine. He dreamed of filling it with his own work and began a series of paintings intended to decorate it, including The Bedroom, The Night Café and Still Life: Vase with Twelve Sunflowers. Van Gogh's Chair grew out of the turbulent weeks he shared there with Paul Gauguin. He painted it as a pair with Paul Gauguin's Armchair, before the crisis in which he cut off his ear, and he continued to refine both canvases after his hospitalisation, which is why the work is dated to 1888 by some sources and 1889 by others. A likely inspiration was Luke Fildes's illustration of Charles Dickens's empty chair, published in The Graphic after the novelist's death in 1870.

What to look for

Look at how little is here, and how much it holds. A plain wooden chair with a woven straw seat stands on a floor of terracotta tiles. On the seat lie a decorated pipe and a pouch of tobacco. In the background, near a door, is an onion box bearing Vincent's name, a quiet signature inside the scene. The colour is the real subject. Van Gogh built this picture on the complementary pair of blue and orange, while its companion portrait of Gauguin's chair uses red and green. Notice how the warm yellows and oranges of the chair and tiles push against the cool blues of the wall and door. In his own words, quoted in the sources, he sought in these studies an effect of light with bright colour.

Meaning and intent

An empty chair is an absence that speaks of a person. Here the simple, unpretentious chair, with its humble pipe and tobacco, stands in for Van Gogh himself. Its pendant, Paul Gauguin's Armchair, is far more lavish and ornate, and the contrast between them has long been read in the light of the two painters' stormy relationship: one sober and rustic, the other elegant and worldly. If Fildes's drawing of Dickens's chair was indeed the inspiration, the image also carries a note of mourning and memory, an object left behind by someone who is gone. Yet the colours are bright and the light is strong. The painting can be seen at once as a self-portrait without a face and as a portrait of a friendship already under strain.

Legacy

Van Gogh's Chair has become one of the artist's most iconic images. His cataloguer Jan Hulsker noted that there are few pictures by Vincent about which so much was written in later years. Its power comes from its modesty: an ordinary piece of furniture, painted with such intensity that it feels charged with a life story. Read alongside its pendant of Gauguin's armchair, it also offers one of art history's most vivid records of a famous artistic friendship at its breaking point. The painting is held by the National Gallery in London, where visitors can stand before this humble chair and find in it something of the man who sat there, smoked his pipe and dreamed of a house full of paintings.