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What do Van Gogh’s Chairs tell us about?

Vincent Van Gogh hoped for great things from his friendship with Paul Gauguin. Gauguin was a far better-known and more confident modern artist than Van Gogh, who had rejected a career as an art dealer in the firm where his younger brother worked to return home to the Netherlands.

Van Gogh arrived in Arles in the south of France in 1888 and rented the Yellow House where he planned to create his utopia. Gauguin however was slow in coming to Arles and finally arrived in October 1888.

At first they got on well, working side by side, criticising one another’s work. But soon Van Gogh felt he was being pushed around. “Gauguin, in spite of himself and in spite of me, has more or less indicated that he wants me to vary my style a little bit,” he wrote to Theo. Meanwhile, Gauguin was appalled by Van Gogh’s taste for old-fashioned artists, and his “romanticism”.

In November 1888, Van Gogh embodied their differences in a scintillatingly intense way. He portrayed their two chairs. Gauguin’s is red, baroque, with a burning candle and books on it. It sits on a flowery carpet, in front of a green wall with a blazing lamp. It’s a chair of exoticism and the night. Vincent’s Chair is very different: it sits in the kitchen corner on battered brown tiles, next to a closed blue door, with a box of onions behind it. Its fat round wooden legs are stoutly braced by uneven bars, the whole thing bashed together quickly and asymmetrically, with a high, hard back and straw seat. Resting on it is a pipe, and tobacco in a bit of crumpled paper. Van Gogh smoked a pipe because Dickens advised it as a cure for melancholy.

It’s impossible to forget what happened next between Vincent and Paul when looking at the paintings. On the evening of December 23 1888, Gauguin, walking in a public garden, was approached by Van Gogh with a razor. Paul talked his friend out of attacking him, but decided to stay in a hotel.