"Paul Gauguin, that curious artist, that alien whose mien and the look in whose eyes vaguely remind one of Rembrandt's 'Portrait of a Man' in the Galerie Lacaze — this friend of mine likes to make one feel that 'a good picture is equivalent to a good deed'; not that he says so, but it is difficult to be on intimate terms with him without being aware of a certain moral responsibility. A few days before we parted, when illness forced me to enter an asylum, I tried to paint 'his empty place'. It is a study of his armchair of dark, red-brown wood, the seat of greenish straw, and in the absent person's place a lighted candlestick and some modern novels."
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'Gauguin's chair', (see http://vangoghletters.org/vg/illustrations/2750.jpg). Van Gogh painted this painting around 19 November, at which time he described it as a 'rather funny' study (see letter 721). That he painted it several days before Gauguin's departure as a symbol of his empty seat is an interpretation given here with hindsight
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Paul Gauguin
Paul Gauguin (7 June 1848 – 8 May 1903) was a French Post-Impressionist painter; From 1895 he lived and painted in Papeete on Tahiti.
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