Vincent van Gogh - Gauguin’s Chair (1888) - Paper Poster N206

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1. Historical and Artistic Context

Vincent van Gogh painted Gauguin’s Chair in November 1888 in Arles, during one of the most intense and decisive periods of his short career. That year was marked by both extraordinary creative output and profound psychological strain. Van Gogh had moved to Arles in February 1888 with the dream of founding a “Studio of the South,” a communal workshop where artists could live and create together in a climate of mutual inspiration. He envisioned it as an alternative to Paris, which he felt had become overcrowded with rivalries, competition, and the rigid structures of the art market. Arles offered him sunshine, cheap living, bright colors, and the potential to create a brotherhood of painters inspired by nature and by one another. Van Gogh rented a modest house, soon known as the Yellow House, which became his residence and studio. He decorated it with his own work, including the famous Sunflowers, hoping to make it inviting for fellow artists who might join him.
The most significant of those hoped-for companions was Paul Gauguin. Van Gogh admired Gauguin as a painter who had broken away from conventional Impressionism and developed a bold, symbolic, and often visionary style. Gauguin was also a man of the world: once a successful stockbroker, he had traveled widely, cultivated a persona of the worldly bohemian, and displayed a strong belief in the power of the artist as prophet. Van Gogh dreamed of persuading Gauguin to stay with him in Arles, and after much correspondence and financial assistance from his brother Theo, Gauguin arrived in late October 1888.
The collaboration of Van Gogh and Gauguin in Arles was as short-lived as it was intense. For nine weeks, the two artists lived and worked side by side, sharing ideas, painting, and engaging in lengthy discussions—sometimes heated arguments—about art, religion, and philosophy. During this time Van Gogh painted some of his most celebrated canvases, including The Bedroom, The Café Terrace at Night, The Night Café, and Sunflowers. Gauguin also produced important works. Yet their personalities clashed: Van Gogh was impulsive, emotional, and vulnerable, while Gauguin was self-confident, intellectual, and domineering. The differences became increasingly irreconcilable.
Amid this charged atmosphere, Van Gogh painted Gauguin’s Chair. It belongs to a pair of paintings, the other being Van Gogh’s Chair. Rather than painting conventional portraits, Van Gogh chose to depict the two artists through their chairs, transforming inanimate objects into symbolic stand-ins for human presence. This choice had precedents in Van Gogh’s thought: he had previously reflected on the symbolism of empty chairs in personal letters, linking them with memories of loss. The two chairs were not painted after Gauguin’s departure, as once thought, but during his stay, and were conceived as pendant works contrasting their identities through objects, colors, and atmosphere. Van Gogh’s Chair shows a simple wooden chair with a straw seat, set in bright daylight with a pipe and a pouch of tobacco. Gauguin’s Chair depicts a more elaborate armchair with a cushion, placed in nocturnal light with two novels and a burning candle. Through these still lifes, Van Gogh crystallized his perception of himself and Gauguin, as well as the difference between their approaches to art and life.

2. Technical and Stylistic Analysis

The composition of Gauguin’s Chair is deceptively simple: a single wooden armchair with curved arms and a green cushion occupies the foreground, slightly turned so that its seat faces diagonally toward the viewer. On the cushion rest two books and a lit candle in a candlestick. The chair stands on a floor rendered with short, block-like brushstrokes in warm reddish-brown and ochre tones. Behind it rises a wall painted green, with a gas lamp fixed in the upper left corner. The perspective is somewhat skewed: the chair appears to thrust forward into the viewer’s space, while the tiles of the floor tilt upward, creating a sense of instability typical of Van Gogh’s work from this period.
The color scheme is dominated by complementary contrasts: red versus green, yellow versus blue. Van Gogh exploited these contrasts deliberately. He wrote to his brother Theo that the painting was “Gauguin’s armchair, a red and green night effect, on the seat two novels and a candle.” The armchair itself is painted in tones of reddish-brown and outlined with blue, creating a shimmering vibration. The cushion is a vivid green, while the wall behind is a cool greenish-blue. The floor is a mosaic of reddish tiles with dabs of yellow and green. The candle flame provides a spot of intense yellow-white light, echoed faintly by the glow of the wall-mounted gas lamp. These juxtapositions produce a chromatic tension, a kind of visual energy that resonates with Gauguin’s perceived personality: dramatic, sophisticated, and nocturnal.
Brushwork in the painting is vigorous, varied, and expressive. The chair’s contours are defined with heavy strokes of contrasting colors. The cushion is rendered with curved strokes following its form, suggesting texture. The floor consists of quick, almost mosaic-like touches of paint that give a sense of movement. The wall is more evenly painted, but still with visible brush marks that create subtle vibration. The flame of the candle is a small but thick dash of paint, glowing against the darker background. The whole surface is worked with impasto: Van Gogh applied paint thickly, letting the texture of his strokes become part of the painting’s expressive power.
Compositionally, Van Gogh placed the chair almost centrally but at a diagonal angle, so that its arm seems to extend toward the viewer. This creates immediacy and a sense of presence, as though the absent sitter might soon return. The objects on the seat—the books and candle—are aligned along the diagonal, reinforcing the thrust of the chair’s position. The lamp on the wall balances the candle, creating a visual echo between artificial sources of light. Perspective distortion enhances expressiveness: rather than striving for strict realism, Van Gogh manipulated space to convey feeling and character.

3. Symbolism and Interpretation

Gauguin’s Chair is saturated with symbolic meaning. First and foremost, the chair itself serves as a proxy portrait of Paul Gauguin. In 19th-century culture, chairs often carried associations of authority, presence, or absence. For Van Gogh, an empty chair could evoke powerful personal emotions: he once recalled weeping at the sight of his late father’s empty chair. Here, the ornate wooden armchair with a green cushion represents Gauguin’s personality as Van Gogh perceived it. In contrast to the humble, rustic chair Van Gogh painted for himself, Gauguin’s chair is more refined, comfortable, and sophisticated, suggesting a man of culture and self-assurance.
The books on the cushion symbolize Gauguin’s intellectual and imaginative side. They are described by Van Gogh as “modern novels,” perhaps referencing Gauguin’s interest in contemporary literature and his own role as a narrator of exotic and symbolic visions. Books were a recurring motif in Van Gogh’s still lifes, often symbolizing ideas, learning, or artistic values. In Still Life with Bible (1885), Van Gogh had juxtaposed the Bible with a modern novel to contrast tradition and modernity. In Gauguin’s Chair, the novels reflect Gauguin’s modernist, worldly orientation.
The candle is an even more charged symbol. As a literal source of light, it represents illumination, inspiration, or the spark of creativity. Its upright flame glowing in the night can be read as a metaphor for Gauguin’s artistic vision, his inner fire. Some interpreters have suggested more psychological or sexual associations, viewing the candle as a phallic symbol of Gauguin’s virility. While such interpretations remain speculative, the candle certainly conveys energy and vitality, burning in Gauguin’s absence but signifying his presence. The fact that the candle is unattended also suggests Gauguin’s love of night, his tendency to stay up late, and his association with the mysterious or the mystical.
The overall atmosphere—the nocturnal setting, the red-green contrasts, the solitary glow of the candle—creates a mood of tension and drama. This reflects Van Gogh’s perception of Gauguin as a man of complexity, intellectual depth, and perhaps inner turmoil. The contrast with Van Gogh’s Chair, bathed in daylight and adorned with humble objects, underscores the differences in character between the two artists: Van Gogh saw himself as plain, honest, grounded, while he viewed Gauguin as sophisticated, intellectual, and enigmatic.
Beyond personal symbolism, the painting has broader implications about portraiture and representation. By portraying a person through their chair and belongings, Van Gogh challenged traditional portraiture. He suggested that objects can embody identity, that absence can convey presence, and that symbolism can be as truthful as likeness. This approach anticipates later modernist explorations of objects as surrogates for human experience.

4. Technique and Materials

Gauguin’s Chair is executed in oil on canvas, size 90 × 70.5 cm (35.4 × 27.8 in). Van Gogh used a standard-size canvas he referred to as “size 30.” He mentioned in a letter that the canvas was thin, but the paint was applied thickly, producing a heavily impastoed surface. Impasto was central to Van Gogh’s technique at this time: he used the physicality of paint to give presence and weight to objects, making the material itself expressive. In Gauguin’s Chair, impasto accentuates the solidity of the chair, the texture of the cushion, and the flicker of the candle flame.
Van Gogh employed a palette dominated by complementary colors: reds and greens, yellows and blues. His interest in color theory was influenced by Delacroix, Chevreul, and his own experiments. He believed that complementary contrasts produced emotional effects and symbolic resonance. Here, red-green contrasts create tension and richness, while yellow-blue accents enhance luminosity. The candle flame is painted with pure yellow and white, surrounded by darker greens and browns, making it glow more intensely.
The brushwork is varied: broad, curving strokes for the chair’s contours; short, block-like strokes for the floor; more even, slightly stippled strokes for the wall. Van Gogh outlined forms with contrasting colors (for instance, using blue outlines around reddish-brown wood) to sharpen their presence and intensify their vibration. This technique contributes to the painting’s vivid, almost hallucinatory effect.
As with many of his Arles works, Van Gogh worked rapidly and energetically, often completing canvases in a single sitting or over a few days. The paint surface reveals his urgency: strokes are decisive, layered, and unapologetically visible. The texture of the brushwork is integral to the aesthetic; it captures not only the look but the energy of the scene.

5. Cultural Impact

Although little known in Van Gogh’s lifetime, Gauguin’s Chair has become an iconic image in discussions of Van Gogh and Gauguin’s relationship. It exemplifies Van Gogh’s originality in using everyday objects to create symbolic portraits, and it stands as a visual testimony to the collaboration—and eventual rupture—between two giants of modern art. The cultural impact of the painting lies not only in its artistic qualities but also in the story it embodies: the hopes of the Studio of the South, the clash of two temperaments, and the tragedy of Van Gogh’s breakdown.
The motif of the empty chair has resonated in broader cultural contexts. Chairs are potent symbols of absence, memory, and authority. In literature and art, an empty chair can evoke loss, longing, or presence-in-absence. Van Gogh’s chairs have influenced later artists and writers. Lucian Freud famously remarked, “Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait, even if it’s a chair,” acknowledging Van Gogh’s achievement. The chairs have also been invoked in exhibitions and writings as metaphors for the artistic dialogue between Van Gogh and Gauguin.
In popular culture, reproductions of Gauguin’s Chair and Van Gogh’s Chair circulate widely. They are frequently referenced in documentaries, films, and books about Van Gogh. They embody the dramatic narrative of friendship, conflict, and tragedy that has captured the public imagination about Van Gogh’s life. As such, the painting contributes to the myth of Van Gogh as a passionate, tormented genius whose art was inseparable from his personal relationships.

6. Critical Reception and Scholarly Interpretations

Early on, Gauguin’s Chair was overshadowed by Van Gogh’s Chair. This was partly due to the decisions of Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, Theo’s widow, who disliked Gauguin and kept Gauguin’s Chair from exhibition. As a result, the painting was not shown publicly until 1928, long after Van Gogh’s reputation had been established. By then, Van Gogh’s Chair was already famous, having entered the collection of Samuel Courtauld and exhibited in London. This imbalance affected early interpretations.
When Gauguin’s Chair finally entered public view, scholars quickly recognized its significance. Interpretations have varied. Some saw the chair as a mournful symbol of Gauguin’s absence, a foreshadowing of the quarrel and separation. Others emphasized the contrast between the two chairs as a statement about differing artistic identities. The presence of the books and candle was read as symbolic of Gauguin’s intellect and creative flame. Psychoanalytic interpretations added further layers, sometimes controversially, suggesting sexual or subconscious symbolism.
Recent scholarship, particularly by Louis van Tilborgh, has revised earlier assumptions. By carefully re-dating Van Gogh’s letters, Van Tilborgh demonstrated that the chairs were painted before the quarrels reached a crisis, and that Van Gogh himself described them as “funny” or “curious.” This shifts interpretation from tragic premonition to optimistic or playful experiment. The chairs were not meant as symbols of rupture but as affectionate, even humorous, portraits of two artists. Later events retroactively cast them in a tragic light.
Scholars have also noted the chairs’ place in Van Gogh’s broader oeuvre. They exemplify his tendency to invest objects with symbolic meaning, to merge portraiture with still life, and to use color for expressive and symbolic effect. They also reflect his interest in pendant compositions: pairs of works that contrast and complement one another, such as the Sunflowers flanking La Berceuse. In this light, Gauguin’s Chair is both a personal portrait and an experiment in color, symbolism, and composition.

7. Museum, Provenance and Exhibition History

After its completion in 1888, Gauguin’s Chair was sent to Theo van Gogh in Paris in 1889. After Theo’s death in 1891, it passed to Johanna van Gogh-Bonger. As noted, she withheld it from exhibition for decades. Only in 1928, after her death, was it first shown publicly. Her son, Vincent Willem van Gogh, later lent it to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where it was displayed from 1930 onwards. In 1962 it entered the Vincent van Gogh Foundation and has since been on permanent loan to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where it remains today.
The companion piece, Van Gogh’s Chair, followed a different path. It was exhibited in London in 1923, acquired by Samuel Courtauld, and became part of the National Gallery, London. Thus, the pair was physically separated: one in Amsterdam, one in London. Rare exhibitions have reunited them, but generally they are displayed apart, leading to different interpretative contexts.
Exhibition history of Gauguin’s Chair includes major retrospectives and thematic shows. It has been shown in exhibitions on Van Gogh’s Arles period, on his relationship with Gauguin, and on broader themes of portraiture and symbolism. Its presence in the Van Gogh Museum ensures wide exposure to the public. When paired with Van Gogh’s Chair, it attracts special attention, as curators and viewers interpret the dialogue or opposition between the two.

8. Interesting Facts
1. Gauguin’s Chair was not exhibited publicly until 1928, nearly forty years after it was painted.
2. Johanna van Gogh-Bonger deliberately withheld it from exhibition because she disliked Gauguin and feared it might cast Vincent in a subordinate role.
3. Van Gogh initially called the paintings “funny” or “curious,” suggesting he saw them playfully rather than tragically.
4. The armchair depicted was the only ornate chair Van Gogh purchased for the Yellow House; the other chairs were plain and straw-seated.
5. The books on the cushion are often identified as “modern novels,” though their exact titles are unknown.
6. Van Gogh used “size 30” canvas, a French standard measuring about 92 × 73 cm, for both chair paintings.
7. The companion painting, Van Gogh’s Chair, is in the National Gallery, London, creating a long-standing separation between the pair.
8. Some psychoanalytic interpreters have read the candle as a sexual symbol, though most scholars see it simply as creative flame or nocturnal habit.
9. Van Gogh later added personal objects (pipe and tobacco) to Van Gogh’s Chair after Gauguin’s departure, reasserting his presence.
10. Lucian Freud admired the chairs, saying, “Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait, even if it’s a chair.”
11. The chairs have been displayed together in only a handful of exhibitions, and their arrangement (facing or facing away) influences interpretation.
12. The color scheme of red and green in Gauguin’s Chair contrasts with the yellow and blue of Van Gogh’s Chair, symbolizing night versus day.
13. The motif of the empty chair later inspired artists and writers as a metaphor for absence and presence.
14. The painting was part of Van Gogh’s broader exploration of pendant works and symbolic color schemes during his Arles period.

9. Conclusion

Gauguin’s Chair (1888) is one of Vincent van Gogh’s most significant symbolic still lifes. Painted during the brief and turbulent cohabitation of Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin in Arles, it transforms a simple armchair into a portrait of Gauguin’s character and presence. Through bold color contrasts, expressive brushwork, and meaningful objects, Van Gogh conveyed the intellectual and fiery aspects of his friend. In contrast with Van Gogh’s Chair, the work embodies the differences between the two artists: rustic simplicity versus cultivated sophistication, daylight versus night, pipe and onions versus books and candle. Historically, the painting is entwined with the drama of their collaboration and rupture. Initially conceived playfully, it acquired later resonance as a symbol of absence after Gauguin’s departure. Technically, it demonstrates Van Gogh’s mastery of impasto, color theory, and expressive distortion. Its cultural impact has been immense, influencing interpretations of Van Gogh’s art and life and resonating with the motif of the empty chair in wider culture. Its reception has evolved: once hidden, it is now celebrated as a masterpiece. Its provenance and exhibition history reflect the complexities of Van Gogh’s.