AFTER looking at paintings for more decades than I care to admit, it is impossible to definitely choose a single one as my favourite painting.

Thousands of paintings, many seen in the original and many more in reproductions, swirled around my head. But Vincent van Gogh’s The Chair of 1888 kept returning.
 
Made of unvarnished, roughly hewn wood with a woven straw seat it was the very antithesis of the dominant late 19th-century bourgeois taste which favoured ornate carvings, precious woods and refined craftsmanship.

Only peasants and poor artisans would have owned such a chair, although the bourgeoisie may well have placed these in their servants’ quarters.
 
To take one these humble objects as the sole subject of his painting was a radical act and an affirmation of van Gogh’s lifelong affinity with and respect for the peasantry and of his distrust of bourgeois hypocrisy and posturing.
 
Van Gogh was one of the most perceptive observers of contemporary society and of his own inner states of mind.
 
He wrote to his brother Theo that he’d painted two chairs as symbolic portraits of himself and of Paul Gauguin with whom he was then living in Arles. His “portrait” painting of Gauguin’s chair also has a straw seat but it is a more comfortable armchair with arm rests and a deep brown varnished walnut frame.