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Artist: Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) hoped for great things from his friendship with the symbolist painter Paul Gauguin (1828-1909). It was to be the beginning of an artist's colony where painters would work side by side as brothers. Van Gogh arrived in Arles in the south of France in 1888, subsidised by his brother Theo, and rented the Yellow House where he planned to create his utopia.
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. After failing as a preacher and a missionary, he patiently taught himself to draw and paint before reaching Paris and post-impressionism in 1886.
Gauguin was slow in coming to Arles. Van Gogh prepared the Yellow House, painting four ecstatic canvases of Sunflowers to decorate the place where he hoped to find fulfilment. Finally, in October 1888, Gauguin arrived.
Subject: 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.
Distinguishing features: The yellow chair 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.
And oh, the emotion. Perhaps Gauguin should have worried about what his friend was feeling when he portrayed both of them like this - gone, vanished, leaving only their old familiar chairs.
After all, Van Gogh, who loved English graphic art, got the idea from an obituary image. At Christmas 1870 the Victorian magazine the Graphic published a valediction for an absent fixture of Christmas past: Charles Dickens had died that year, and Luke Fildes' illustration The Empty Chair, Gad's Hill - Ninth of June 1870 depicts Dickens's chair at his desk, pulled back, but empty, no one there to write that year's Christmas story.
It's impossible to forget what happened next between Vincent and Paul when looking at this painting. 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.
That same night Van Gogh appeared at a local brothel and gave his severed earlobe to a prostitute named Rachel. He agreed to be hospitalised at St Rémy near Arles, and then stayed with the modern-art-loving Dr Paul Gachet at Auvers-sur-Oise, among whose wheatfields, on July 27 1890, he shot himself.
Van Gogh smoked a pipe because Dickens advised it as a cure for melancholy. His pipe lies abandoned here.
Inspirations and influences: Van Gogh's portrait of a chair is the expressionist anticipation of Marcel Duchamp's readymades.
Where is it? National Gallery, London WC2 (020-7747 2885).