In November 1888, Vincent van Gogh painted his chair. Not a special chair. Not a chair with any distinguishing history or symbolic resonance that he chose for those qualities. The chair in his room in Arles — wooden, rush-seated, slightly worn, the kind of chair that exists in its millions in the rooms of people who do not paint — was painted because it was there, and because Van Gogh had spent enough time in its presence, in the particular quality of Arles light, that he had understood something about it that the word chair does not begin to contain.
The painting is now in the National Gallery in London, where it has hung for decades under the title Van Gogh’s Chair. Millions of people have stood in front of it. Most of them, one suspects, have felt something they could not account for: a pull toward this unremarkable object that exceeds anything the object itself should produce. They are feeling, I want to suggest, what Van Gogh felt when he looked at the chair: not the chair as furniture, not the chair as symbol, not even the chair as form — though the painting attends to its form with extraordinary precision — but the chair as a concentration of the particular light of a particular afternoon in a particular room in Arles, preserved in paint with a fidelity not to appearance but to experience.
This is the transfiguration that this chapter is about. Not the religious variety — the chair is not made sacred, is not elevated above its nature as a chair — but the transfiguration of sustained attention: the change that comes over an object when it has been looked at long enough, honestly enough, with enough willingness to receive what it is rather than what it is supposed to be. The chair does not become something other than a chair. It becomes more fully itself than any representation of a chair had previously been.
Look at the painting. The chair occupies almost the entire picture plane — there is barely any room at the edges, barely any background, just the tiled floor, the corner of the room, a box in the lower left that says Vincent, a pipe and some tobacco on the rush seat. The chair is not framed, not placed within a compositional structure that would give it pictorial context. It is simply there, in the light, filling the frame with its specific yellow-green presence against the blue-green wall.
What the chair is not: It is not a symbol. The temptation — encouraged by the painting’s art-historical context, by the knowledge that Van Gogh painted it alongside a companion painting of Gauguin’s armchair, by the biographical narrative of their friendship and its violent end — is to read the chair as a symbol of absence, of Van Gogh himself, of the emptiness he felt. Resist this. The painting predates all of that narrative weight, and attending to it as symbol forecloses the experience of attending to it as painting. The chair is a chair. The pipe and tobacco are a pipe and tobacco. The box that says Vincent is a box in the corner of a room. These things are present. Nothing is absent.
The color: Van Gogh’s yellows are not the yellows of description. The chair is not painted the color a chair is; it is painted the color this chair was in this light at this time of day — a yellow-green that pushes toward the warmth of late afternoon without quite reaching it, held in tension with the blue-green of the wall and the orange-brown of the floor. These are not complementary colors deployed for compositional effect. They are the specific chromatic facts of a specific room at a specific hour, transcribed with a fidelity that has nothing to do with optical accuracy and everything to do with experiential truth.
The brushwork: Look at the rush seat. The marks Van Gogh uses to describe the woven rush are not illusionistic — he is not trying to reproduce the texture of rush seating. They are marks that carry the quality of his attention: the specific rhythm of looking at this surface, the pressure of noticing, the physical record of a sustained encounter between an eye and an object. The painting is not a representation of a chair. It is a record of what it felt like to look at this chair, in this room, in this light, for long enough that the looking became something more than looking.
Claude Monet began painting haystacks in the summer of 1890 and did not stop until he had made twenty-five canvases. He returned to the same field near his house in Giverny at different times of day, in different seasons, in different weather, painting the same two or three haystacks in morning light and evening light and winter snow and summer haze. The project was not about haystacks. It was about what happens to light as it moves across an ordinary form through the course of a day and a season — about the haystack as an index of perception, a stable object against which the instability of light could be measured and recorded.
This is the ordinary transfigured in a different register from Van Gogh’s chair. Van Gogh’s transfiguration is intimate: it is the record of sustained attention to a single object in a specific interior space, the accumulation of looking that makes a chair fully itself. Monet’s transfiguration is atmospheric: it is the record of how light transforms an ordinary form across time, how the same haystacks are different things in the morning and the evening, in August and in January, in clear air and in mist. The haystacks are not the subject of the series. The light is. The haystacks are simply the occasion on which the light makes itself visible.
The dissolution of edges: The haystacks do not have clear outlines. Their boundaries are zones of color transition rather than lines — the warm pinks and mauves of the haystack surface merge into the cooler pinks and greens of the field behind them, so that the haystacks are present as concentrations of color and warmth rather than as defined volumes in space. This is not impressionistic vagueness. It is the accurate record of how objects look in the specific quality of late-summer haze: their edges softened by the atmosphere, their forms present but not hard, their relationship to the surrounding space atmospheric rather than geometric.
The field as color field: The ground on which the haystacks stand is not green or brown as the ground of a field is conventionally painted. It is a continuous field of pinks, mauves, blue-greens, and pale yellows — the colors of late afternoon light reflected from and absorbed into the stubble. The ground is as atmospheric as the sky, as variable in color as the haystacks themselves. The painting does not distinguish clearly between the haystack, the field, and the sky as three separate zones of the composition. They are all made of the same light, differing only in their concentration of warmth and color.
The haystacks as occasion: What Monet understood, and what the series demonstrates across twenty-five canvases, is that the haystack is not the subject of these paintings in any conventional sense. The subject is the quality of light at the end of summer in a field near Giverny, and the haystack is the object that makes that light visible — the stable form against which the atmosphere’s continuous variation can be measured and recorded. Any sufficiently stable, sufficiently textured, sufficiently ordinary form would have served. Monet chose haystacks. The choice was not aesthetic. It was opportunistic: they were there, in his field, in the light he wanted to paint, and they would stay there long enough for him to return to them at different times of day across a season. The ordinariness of the haystacks was not a problem to be overcome. It was the point.
What Van Gogh and Monet share, despite their very different methods and temperaments, is the understanding that the ordinary world contains an inexhaustible supply of subjects for sustained visual attention — that the chair and the haystack are not less interesting than the dramatic event or the spectacular landscape, but differently interesting, in a register that requires more patience and less drama to access. The patience is the work. The drama, if it comes, comes from the depth of the attention rather than from the nature of the subject.
For the photographer, the implication is uncomfortable and liberating in equal measure. There is no hierarchy of subjects. The chair in the corner of the room is as valid a subject as the crowd in the street. The haystack in the field is as valid as the moment of peak legibility. What determines the value of the subject is not its nature but the quality of attention brought to it — and that quality is the photographer’s responsibility, not the world’s.
- Vincent van Gogh — The Letters (Thames & Hudson, 2009) Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo contain the most precise and passionate account of what it feels like to look at an ordinary object with sustained attention. The letters from Arles (1888–89), written alongside the chair and the bedroom paintings, are the directly relevant material.
- Claude Monet — The Haystacks (Art Institute of Chicago, 1995) The catalogue from the Art Institute exhibition that brought the haystacks series together for the first time. The comparative plates — the same haystacks in morning and evening, summer and winter — demonstrate the series argument more clearly than any individual painting can.
- Meyer Schapiro — Van Gogh (Abrams, 1950) The best single essay on Van Gogh’s relationship to ordinary objects and working-class subjects. Schapiro resists the biographical reductionism that turns the paintings into symptoms and insists on attending to them as paintings. Still the most useful critical account.
- William Eggleston — William Eggleston’s Guide (MoMA, 1976) The photographic equivalent of Van Gogh’s chair: ordinary objects in the American South, in saturated color, looked at with a quality of attention that transforms them without making them symbolic. The most direct photographic heir to the tradition this chapter describes.