.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
'I’ve always loved chairs: they have arms and legs, like people.' — David Hockney
The Chair (1985) is a vibrant, playful and dynamic painting of one of David Hockney’s most beloved motifs. Depicted in his pioneering ‘reverse perspective’ — which places the viewer at the vanishing point, looking outward to infinity — a wooden chair upholstered in rich blue fabric tilts and shifts before a kaleidoscopic ground of red, orange and yellow. Mahogany and golden tones stripe its legs and arms, which twist with anthropomorphic energy: velvety shadows, polished gleams and fine woodgrain are observed in detailed splendour. Prefiguring Hockney’s 1988 tributes to Vincent van Gogh’s iconic chair paintings, the work is full of personality. It also displays the unique new approach to perspective that Hockney forged during the 1980s, drawing upon the lessons of photography, Cubism and Chinese landscape painting to shatter conventional ways of depicting the world. The Chair has been prominently exhibited throughout its lifetime, including in Hockney’s landmark retrospective which toured Los Angeles, New York and London in 1988: most recently, it was seen in the celebrated 2025 survey David Hockney 25 at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris.
In 1985, the year he made the present work, Hockney presented a 41-page visual essay in the Christmas edition of French Vogue. In it, he set out how traditional Western one-point perspective required the viewer to be static, and could not capture the richness of the human experience in time and space. ‘Time stops, and space becomes fixed’, he wrote. ‘Let’s begin a journey to a land where perspective is more complex … if perspective is reversed, then infinity is everywhere, and the viewer is now in motion’ (D. Hockney, ‘Vogue par David Hockney’, in Vogue Paris, December 1985-January 1986, n.p.). The chair was a central motif in the essay: he illustrated drawings of chairs, a painting near-identical to the present work, and a photocollage ‘joiner’ of a metal chair in the Jardin du Luxembourg to illustrate his proposals.
Chairs had long played an important role in Hockney’s pictures. They variously served as formal experiments in pattern and volume, added psychological weight to his portraits, or stood in for absent sitters. Striking examples include the floral armchair in the foundational work California Art Collector (1964), the wicker seats in the iconic double portrait Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (1968), and the poignant Chair and Shirt (1972), where a striped shirt slung over an empty chair evokes the end of the relationship between Hockney and his partner, Peter Schlesinger. Chairs filled Hockney’s 1980s paintings of the interior of his Los Angeles home, ranging from Modernist loungers to a rocking chair and a plush chaise longue. In the present work, the chair becomes a device through which Hockney explores a new understanding of visual space.
'Because of the many viewpoints seen in these pictures, the eye is forced to move all the time.' — David Hockney
Hockney’s photocollages, begun earlier in the 1980s, were central to the development of these ideas. These ‘joiners’ compounded multiple snapshots of the same subject, creating a neo-Cubist overlap of different viewpoints. They were informed by his abiding appreciation for Pablo Picasso and also by Chinese landscape painting, which he had come to greatly admire during his visit to the country in 1981. Observing traditional artists at work, he saw that scroll paintings avoided allegiance to any one viewpoint: by constantly shifting the viewer’s orientation across a composition, they recreated the sense of walking through a landscape, absorbing it bit by bit. They immersed the viewer within the work, making the experience of observation temporal as well as spatial. The Chair aims to achieve a similar effect. ‘Because of the many viewpoints seen in these pictures,’ Hockney wrote of this work and its companions, ‘the eye is forced to move all the time. When the perspective moves through time, you begin to convert time into space. As you move, the shapes of the chairs change, and the straight lines of the floor also seem to move in different ways’ (D. Hockney quoted in Hockney’s Pictures, London 2004, p. 105).
'I've always had quite a passion for van Gogh, but certainly from the early seventies it grew a lot, and it's still growing.' — David Hockney
1988, the year of Hockney’s three-venue retrospective, saw also the centenary of Vincent van Gogh’s arrival in Arles in 1888. Hockney was among a number of artists — including Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein — asked by the town’s photography festival to create homages to van Gogh. Hockney painted his Van Gogh Chair and a companion work, Gauguin’s Chair. Both were ‘reverse perspective’ versions of van Gogh’s paintings, which themselves were proxy portraits of the two artists: van Gogh’s chair simple and rustic, Gauguin’s lavish and ornate, with a burning candle on its seat. Hockney liked the first painting so much that he made another version of himself, having donated the first to the Van Gogh Foundation. He returned periodically to this motif, creating a suite of Van Gogh Chair etchings in 1998, as well showcasing new paintings on the theme in his 2025-2026 London exhibition Some Very, Very, Very New Paintings Not Yet Shown in Paris.
The latter exhibition, in fact, was sparked by the present work, which Hockney had been struck by upon seeing it installed at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. ‘I remember it didn’t just jump off the wall, it seemed to be there!’, he said. ‘That started me off again’ (D. Hockney quoted in M. Gayford, ‘Lessons in Chairs—and the Joy of Delphiniums’, in David Hockney: Some Very, Very, Very New Paintings Not Yet Shown in Paris, exh. cat. Annely Juda Fine Art, London 2025, p. 53). He made several new paintings featuring the same blue-upholstered chair, including an interior scene with a collage reproducing the present work alongside Van Gogh Chair and Gauguin’s Chair. This particular chair appears to have held enduring fascination for Hockney. He painted a number of studies before embarking on the present work, and later transformed the chair into a sculpture — complete with perspectival slant and meandering limbs—as a real piece of furniture. This monumental sculpture is now part of the major Hockney collection held in Salts Mill, near the artist’s birthplace of Bradford.
While the present work predates Hockney’s own Van Gogh Chair, the Dutch artist’s 1888 painting, which hangs in the National Gallery in London, is a presiding spirit. ‘The perspective is terrific’, Hockney says of that work. ‘It’s a very personal view. You couldn’t take a photograph like this. I’ve always loved this painting. Whenever my father came to London, he always wanted to see Van Gogh’s Chair. He thought it was marvellous.’ Van Gogh’s paintings, Hockney explains, ‘made the world very exciting … He is a very, very great artist. I’ve always thought so … He might have been miserable, but that doesn’t show in his work. There are always things that will try to pull you down. But we should be joyful in looking at the world’ (D. Hockney quoted in M. Bailey, ‘What Hockney Thinks of Van Gogh’, The Art Newspaper, 9 October 2015, n.p.). It is a message eloquently expressed in The Chair, which comes alive with colour and delight as we see the world anew through Hockney’s eyes.
The Chair (1985) is a vibrant, playful and dynamic painting of one of David Hockney’s most beloved motifs. Depicted in his pioneering ‘reverse perspective’ — which places the viewer at the vanishing point, looking outward to infinity — a wooden chair upholstered in rich blue fabric tilts and shifts before a kaleidoscopic ground of red, orange and yellow. Mahogany and golden tones stripe its legs and arms, which twist with anthropomorphic energy: velvety shadows, polished gleams and fine woodgrain are observed in detailed splendour. Prefiguring Hockney’s 1988 tributes to Vincent van Gogh’s iconic chair paintings, the work is full of personality. It also displays the unique new approach to perspective that Hockney forged during the 1980s, drawing upon the lessons of photography, Cubism and Chinese landscape painting to shatter conventional ways of depicting the world. The Chair has been prominently exhibited throughout its lifetime, including in Hockney’s landmark retrospective which toured Los Angeles, New York and London in 1988: most recently, it was seen in the celebrated 2025 survey David Hockney 25 at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris.
In 1985, the year he made the present work, Hockney presented a 41-page visual essay in the Christmas edition of French Vogue. In it, he set out how traditional Western one-point perspective required the viewer to be static, and could not capture the richness of the human experience in time and space. ‘Time stops, and space becomes fixed’, he wrote. ‘Let’s begin a journey to a land where perspective is more complex … if perspective is reversed, then infinity is everywhere, and the viewer is now in motion’ (D. Hockney, ‘Vogue par David Hockney’, in Vogue Paris, December 1985-January 1986, n.p.). The chair was a central motif in the essay: he illustrated drawings of chairs, a painting near-identical to the present work, and a photocollage ‘joiner’ of a metal chair in the Jardin du Luxembourg to illustrate his proposals.
Chairs had long played an important role in Hockney’s pictures. They variously served as formal experiments in pattern and volume, added psychological weight to his portraits, or stood in for absent sitters. Striking examples include the floral armchair in the foundational work California Art Collector (1964), the wicker seats in the iconic double portrait Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (1968), and the poignant Chair and Shirt (1972), where a striped shirt slung over an empty chair evokes the end of the relationship between Hockney and his partner, Peter Schlesinger. Chairs filled Hockney’s 1980s paintings of the interior of his Los Angeles home, ranging from Modernist loungers to a rocking chair and a plush chaise longue. In the present work, the chair becomes a device through which Hockney explores a new understanding of visual space.
'Because of the many viewpoints seen in these pictures, the eye is forced to move all the time.' — David Hockney
Hockney’s photocollages, begun earlier in the 1980s, were central to the development of these ideas. These ‘joiners’ compounded multiple snapshots of the same subject, creating a neo-Cubist overlap of different viewpoints. They were informed by his abiding appreciation for Pablo Picasso and also by Chinese landscape painting, which he had come to greatly admire during his visit to the country in 1981. Observing traditional artists at work, he saw that scroll paintings avoided allegiance to any one viewpoint: by constantly shifting the viewer’s orientation across a composition, they recreated the sense of walking through a landscape, absorbing it bit by bit. They immersed the viewer within the work, making the experience of observation temporal as well as spatial. The Chair aims to achieve a similar effect. ‘Because of the many viewpoints seen in these pictures,’ Hockney wrote of this work and its companions, ‘the eye is forced to move all the time. When the perspective moves through time, you begin to convert time into space. As you move, the shapes of the chairs change, and the straight lines of the floor also seem to move in different ways’ (D. Hockney quoted in Hockney’s Pictures, London 2004, p. 105).
'I've always had quite a passion for van Gogh, but certainly from the early seventies it grew a lot, and it's still growing.' — David Hockney
1988, the year of Hockney’s three-venue retrospective, saw also the centenary of Vincent van Gogh’s arrival in Arles in 1888. Hockney was among a number of artists — including Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein — asked by the town’s photography festival to create homages to van Gogh. Hockney painted his Van Gogh Chair and a companion work, Gauguin’s Chair. Both were ‘reverse perspective’ versions of van Gogh’s paintings, which themselves were proxy portraits of the two artists: van Gogh’s chair simple and rustic, Gauguin’s lavish and ornate, with a burning candle on its seat. Hockney liked the first painting so much that he made another version of himself, having donated the first to the Van Gogh Foundation. He returned periodically to this motif, creating a suite of Van Gogh Chair etchings in 1998, as well showcasing new paintings on the theme in his 2025-2026 London exhibition Some Very, Very, Very New Paintings Not Yet Shown in Paris.
The latter exhibition, in fact, was sparked by the present work, which Hockney had been struck by upon seeing it installed at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. ‘I remember it didn’t just jump off the wall, it seemed to be there!’, he said. ‘That started me off again’ (D. Hockney quoted in M. Gayford, ‘Lessons in Chairs—and the Joy of Delphiniums’, in David Hockney: Some Very, Very, Very New Paintings Not Yet Shown in Paris, exh. cat. Annely Juda Fine Art, London 2025, p. 53). He made several new paintings featuring the same blue-upholstered chair, including an interior scene with a collage reproducing the present work alongside Van Gogh Chair and Gauguin’s Chair. This particular chair appears to have held enduring fascination for Hockney. He painted a number of studies before embarking on the present work, and later transformed the chair into a sculpture — complete with perspectival slant and meandering limbs—as a real piece of furniture. This monumental sculpture is now part of the major Hockney collection held in Salts Mill, near the artist’s birthplace of Bradford.
While the present work predates Hockney’s own Van Gogh Chair, the Dutch artist’s 1888 painting, which hangs in the National Gallery in London, is a presiding spirit. ‘The perspective is terrific’, Hockney says of that work. ‘It’s a very personal view. You couldn’t take a photograph like this. I’ve always loved this painting. Whenever my father came to London, he always wanted to see Van Gogh’s Chair. He thought it was marvellous.’ Van Gogh’s paintings, Hockney explains, ‘made the world very exciting … He is a very, very great artist. I’ve always thought so … He might have been miserable, but that doesn’t show in his work. There are always things that will try to pull you down. But we should be joyful in looking at the world’ (D. Hockney quoted in M. Bailey, ‘What Hockney Thinks of Van Gogh’, The Art Newspaper, 9 October 2015, n.p.). It is a message eloquently expressed in The Chair, which comes alive with colour and delight as we see the world anew through Hockney’s eyes.