Dog on a Chair

You come to Otterlo for the Van Goghs, and in among them hangs this small, undated panel of a dog that has climbed onto a chair and settled there as if it owns the room. It is here for a reason. Helene Kroller-Muller built her collection in the early 1900s around Vincent van Gogh, and Van Gogh revered Monticelli, copying his work and naming him in letter after letter. Collecting the master, she collected the man he admired, and a cluster of Monticelli's Marseille panels travelled to the Dutch woods along the way. The subject is as offhand as they come, with no title beyond the plain fact of a dog on a chair, the paint worked wet and quick so the animal's coat and the seat almost run together. Nothing about it was made for a museum wall. It was the kind of thing he turned out by the dozen in his last Marseille years, sold cheap or handed to friends, which is why so few of them carry a date.