oil on canvas · 1923 · m. corvin
no one is sitting in it. no one has just left it. there is no sense, from the painting itself, of who the chair belongs to or what it is for. corvin painted the chair four times, in four years, and never anyone in it.
it sits in the parlour beside the painting of the dog. the dog is asleep; the chair is empty; the two paintings keep each other a kind of company. the chair in the painting is also, by family report, the chair in the corner of the kitchen, repainted twice but still recognisably itself.
field-note a child once asked why the chair was so sad. no one had thought to call it sad before. the word has stuck.