Van Gogh painted the picture on one of the coarse canvases that Gauguin had brought with him to Aries, and built the composition up through flat, broad areas of colour combined with complex pattern created through the complicated lines of the chair and tiles. By including his pipe and tobacco, and his name signed in the background, the object becomes instantly personalized and as such assumes a mantle of emotive expression unconnected to the everyday form of a chair,