Two thousand years ago, sculptors carving the stone gateways and railings of sites like Sanchi and Bharhut in India faced a problem. How do you show someone who has reached enlightenment, who has passed beyond the cycle of birth and death?
Their answer was not to show the Buddha at all. Instead, they carved an empty throne beneath the Bodhi tree, as if he had only just stood up.
This is what the empty chair symbolises to me. It’s the idea of a space designated for reflection, a place whose purpose is finding a moment to breathe.
What Does an Empty Chair Symbolise in Art?
In art, an empty chair usually symbolises absence: the space left by someone who has died, gone away, or never arrived. It is closely linked with grief, memory, loneliness and waiting.
Think about what a chair actually is. Four legs, a seat, a back, all shaped around a body that doesn’t even exist yet. But there is also memory. A chair remembers the person it was made for: the dip in a cushion, the angle it was pushed back from the table.
For a moment, I started to remember all the chairs that have given me comfort, discomfort, and carried me from one place to another. That thought has left me wanting to stand for a moment.
More importantly, I started to think about how many cultures don’t even use the chair. In Japan, families still gather on tatami mats around low tables, and in much of the world people sit cross-legged or squat close to the ground. The chair is a Western symbol of comfort. In many ways, it separates us from the earth and from deeper connections, tying us to a synthetic, man-made object that gives us the illusion of comfort but, in my opinion, weakens our spirit.
I digress. Because a chair is made to hold a human body, an empty one makes us picture the person who should be sitting there.
For me, it also symbolises a state of the unknown. When we sit, our legs become the fifth and sixth pillars, holding our bodies in a state of rest or unrest. Then there are chairs that are shared, with stories that witness every walk of life. There are chairs that never have a soul resting on them, and chairs in the prime location for the sun to dwell on.
There is another uncanny state a chair can be found in: a presence too important, too sacred or too powerful to show. A seat kept ready for someone who is coming. The throne waiting for its king. Like the empty room, the empty chair reflects whatever we bring to it.
The Most Symbolic Chair in Art: The Empty Throne
If I had to choose the single most symbolic chair in the history of art, it wouldn’t be Van Gogh’s.
It would be a throne with no one sitting on it. Think about this for a moment. How many people have ever sat on a throne? Very few, and that’s exactly what gives it its power. Why is this one chair so full of opulence and greatness? Sometimes it’s carved in a castle; other times it’s nestled beneath the Bodhi tree, surrounded by footprints, Dharma wheels and hollow cups, where worshippers kneel before the empty seat as though someone is sitting there. Because, for them, someone is.
The Prepared Throne in Christian Art
Several centuries later, Christian artists arrived at a strikingly similar symbol. In early mosaics in Rome and Ravenna, you can find an empty throne glittering in gold, often holding a cross, a closed book, a cushion, or a dove. It is called the *Hetoimasia*, from a Greek word meaning “preparation”: the throne prepared for Christ’s return at the end of time.
If you’ve ever stepped into a church, you will find that your eyes are drawn forward, toward the altar and the light above it. In some of the oldest churches, like Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, what waits there is surprising: a golden throne with no one on it. Saints and angels gather around it, all turned toward the empty seat.
The mosaic was made in the 430s, only about twenty years after Rome had been sacked by the Goths. Earthly thrones were proving fragile. Yet here, shining in gold above the altar, was a throne that no army could take, kept ready for a King who would one day return. If that isn’t importance, I don’t know what is.
Then we can study the aesthetic of the throne. Every element is tuned to someone who is expected to sit down, and to the responsibility that comes with that seat. What really makes this chair symbolic, in my eyes, is the importance it has held for so many civilisations. It goes as far as the Maya, whose rulers appeared high above the crowds on towering pyramids, a spectacle people had to look up to, toward the heavens.
Keep that in mind as we move forward, because I think a little of that sacred waiting survives in every empty chair painted since.
Grief: Luke Fildes and Dickens’s Empty Chair
When Charles Dickens died in June 1870, the illustrator Luke Fildes was working with him on his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Fildes visited Dickens’s study at Gad’s Hill and drew it as it had been left: the desk, the books, and the writer’s chair, pushed back and empty.
He called it The Empty Chair, Gad’s Hill: Ninth of June 1870. Published as a print in The Graphic that Christmas, it moved readers across Britain.
Everyone understood immediately what the chair meant. The voice behind so many stories had gone quiet. I think of a writer’s chair as the place where the flow state happens, where hours disappear and the words just come. Seeing it empty is like seeing that flow cut off mid-sentence, and for Dickens it literally was, since *Edwin Drood* was never finished.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the objects we leave behind that tell a story: a cup of coffee gone cold and half finished, a book left open face down. Like Dickens’s chair, they hold the shape of a moment that was interrupted.
Notice how the symbol has changed. The sacred throne waited for someone to come. Dickens’s chair waits for someone who never will. That makes me feel uncomfortable about the things I’ve left unfinished.
Friendship and Its Loss: Van Gogh’s Two Chairs (1888)
Fildes’s drawing travelled further than he could have imagined. Years later, a young Vincent van Gogh, who collected prints from The Graphic, owned a copy and wrote to his brother about how deeply it moved him. The empty chair was being passed from one artist to the next.
In late 1888, Paul Gauguin came to stay with Van Gogh at the Yellow House in Arles.
If you know about Van Gogh’s ear, you’re well aware of his tumultuous relationship with his dear friend. It wasn’t long, barely a month, before their friendship began to crack. Around then, Van Gogh painted two chairs as a pair, and every object in them is a symbol.
Van Gogh’s Chair is a plain wooden chair with a rush seat on a red-tiled floor, in daylight. On the seat lie his pipe and tobacco, symbols of quiet, everyday contemplation. Behind it, a box of sprouting onions carries his signature, “Vincent”: life pushing up from the earth, humble and rooted. It is the artist as he saw himself.
Gauguin’s Chair is an elegant armchair painted at night under a gas lamp. On its seat sit a lit candle and two novels. The candle suggests imagination and inner light, but also how quickly a flame burns down. The books suggest a man of ideas and invention. Daylight against night, earth against imagination: Van Gogh was painting their differences.
The beauty of these paintings isn’t the style, the brushstrokes, or the composition, but the profound character study hidden in the details. You can see two men who are like oil and water, trying to coexist and share ideas, yet constantly slipping around each other, holding off the catastrophe that was coming.
Just before Christmas 1888, after a violent quarrel, Van Gogh cut off part of his own ear. Gauguin left Arles, and the two men never saw each other again. Van Gogh later wrote that he had tried to paint his friend’s “empty place” in that armchair. Today the two chairs hang in different countries: Van Gogh’s in the National Gallery in London, Gauguin’s in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
Even now, they are kept apart. I think that’s the irony of it all. Perhaps they are exactly where they need to be, watching each other from afar instead of crowding into each other’s space.
Whenever I visit the National Gallery, I can’t look at Van Gogh’s chair without feeling something heavy in my gut. It is such a modest object, painted with such care. Knowing what came next makes it almost unbearable: a portrait of a man, and a friendship, just before both began to break. I wonder if that feeling ever left him.
Waiting: Vilhelm Hammershøi’s Silent Rooms
If you’ve read my blog post about empty rooms, you’ll know Vilhelm Hammershøi already, and his chairs carry the same quiet.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, Hammershøi painted the same few rooms of his Copenhagen apartment, at Strandgade 30, again and again. Often it’s just a single chair set against a bare wall. Sometimes his wife, Ida, appears with her back to us, sitting in that same chair or standing nearby, never quite letting us in. In paintings like Interior with Young Woman Seen from the Back (1904), you find yourself waiting for her to turn around. She never does.
His paintings have an unusually strange, suspended feeling, like a quiet afternoon at home when you can’t tell whether the stillness is peaceful or lonely.
Hammershøi is far less famous than Van Gogh, but if you want to understand how an empty chair can make silence visible, he is the painter to look at.
Identity: Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965)
What actually makes a chair a chair? That’s the question the American artist Joseph Kosuth asked in One and Three Chairs (1965). And it’s a great question.
The work is made of three things placed side by side: a real wooden chair, a life-size photograph of that same chair, and an enlarged dictionary definition of the word “chair.” Three versions of one thing: the object, the image, and the idea.
At first it might feel like a trick, or just repetitive. But buried in the gaps between those three chairs is something that gets right to the heart of how symbols work. Here’s the part I love: the chair isn’t always the same one. Each time the work is shown, a different chair can be used and photographed, and it’s still considered the same artwork. The object changes, but the idea stays.
When we look at an empty chair in a painting, we never really see just furniture. Sure, at first we see an object that furnishes a room, but a moment later we start to question its purpose. We see the idea of a person, a memory, a feeling. Kosuth’s chairs confront us with that same question. What does this simple chair want from us? Is it a memory of something that once existed, stripped back and echoed through time? And where does the meaning actually live: in the object, in the picture, or in us?
For a blog about symbols, I can’t think of a more fitting question.
Death: Andy Warhol’s Electric Chair
This is a grim part of the chair’s story, but one we need to remember. Not every empty chair is gentle. In 1963, Andy Warhol began a series of silkscreen prints based on a 1953 press photograph of the electric chair at Sing Sing prison in New York, the same year Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed there.
The chair sits empty in a bare room. On the wall behind it hangs a small sign that reads “Silence.”
Warhol printed the image over and over, in different colours, sometimes so faintly it almost disappears. The repetition is unsettling. It suggests how images of death, seen again and again in newspapers and on television, slowly stop shocking us.
The word “Silence” also makes me question how we approach a chair and sit down. There are some chairs we sink into and others that creak and need to be adjusted. The silence can come from the observer or the subject: the hush of the people watching, or the final quiet of the person in the chair.
This is the empty chair at its darkest, the coldest instance without a single glimmer of hope. It waits eagerly for the next person, who will never get up again. It’s full of the last memories one has.
The Missing Many: Chairs as Memorials
If one empty chair can hold one person’s absence, many empty chairs can hold the absence of a whole community. I first understood this at my family’s dinner table. Eating together is a tradition that’s slowly fading in many Western countries, but in my house it always mattered. I once read that “the dinner table is the heart of the home,” and I believe it. So when my grandmother stopped coming to dinner, her empty chair felt strange, as if her memory and her shadow still lingered there.
Does the word “fairytale” come to mind when you think of empty chairs? It did for Ai Weiwei. In 2007, he brought 1,001 antique Qing dynasty chairs to an exhibition in Kassel, Germany, along with 1,001 ordinary Chinese citizens, many of whom had never travelled abroad before. For them, the journey itself was a kind of fairytale, so that’s what he called the project. Each chair suggested a person, a journey, and a life, scattered through the exhibition halls for visitors to sit in. I never made it to the exhibition, but I keep imagining the energy in those rooms, strangers resting in chairs that had outlived generations. Close your eyes for a moment. Which chair would you have chosen?
Then there’s Kraków, Poland. In Ghetto Heroes Square, Jewish residents of the ghetto were gathered for deportation during the Second World War, and the ground was left littered with the furniture families had been forced to leave behind. Since 2005, oversized bronze chairs have stood across the square, as though people have just stood up and walked away.
What gets me most is that some of the chairs sit right at the tram stops. I visited Kraków over a decade ago, and I must have walked right past them. That’s the part that stays with me: how many things do we walk past without noticing? Thinking about it makes me feel uncomfortable, maybe a little sad, but also strangely hopeful that they’re still there, waiting to be seen. It’s a reminder that the past isn’t fenced off somewhere. It’s often sitting right next to us, in plain sight, forgotten in the shroud of history.
At the Oklahoma City National Memorial, a field of 168 empty chairs honours each person killed in the 1995 bombing. They’re arranged in nine rows, one for each floor of the building, so every chair sits roughly where that person was when it happened. The most heartbreaking part is that the smaller chairs are for the children.
It’s a symbol you’d understand almost anywhere in the world: small furniture belongs to the innocent, to the parts of humanity that are still growing. The detail that haunts me most is the glass base of each chair, which glows from below at night like a flickering flame of memory, a reminder that warmth exists in everyone. When I look around my own space, I notice how rarely the chairs move. That’s why this piece makes me question whether I’d notice if one of them were suddenly empty.
And then there’s the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo, who has used chairs throughout her work to speak about violence and the people it erases. In Noviembre 6 y 7, she slowly lowered around 280 wooden chairs down the walls of Bogotá’s Palace of Justice over 53 hours, the length of the deadly siege there in 1985. I can only imagine watching them come down, one by one.
What all of these works understand is that we don’t need to see a face to feel a loss. We just need to know someone was there. Sometimes the furniture says it for us. An empty chair isn’t really empty; it’s full of everyone who ever sat in it.
The Empty Chair in Psychology
Is there someone you never got to say goodbye to? So far, the empty chair has been something we look at. Now it’s time to pull up a seat across from it.
In the empty chair technique, popularised by Fritz Perls in Gestalt therapy, a person sits facing an empty chair and imagines someone sitting in it: a parent, a former partner, someone who has died, or even a part of themselves. Then they speak to that person, saying what was never said. Sometimes they even switch seats and answer back.
It sounds simple, but people often find it surprisingly powerful. The empty chair gives the absent person a place in the room. It makes the conversation feel real enough to have.
It makes me think of my grandmother’s chair at our dinner table, and what I might say if I sat across from it. I would ask her why she sits on that spot, what she likes about it and why she keeps returning there.
I find that striking, because artists have been doing something similar for centuries. Think of a painter sitting in front of a blank canvas, or a writer hunched over an empty page, shifting in their chair to find the right angle and the right words. The blank canvas is its own kind of empty chair: a space waiting to be filled with everything we couldn’t say out loud. Maybe that’s why making art can feel like therapy.
If you’re interested in how symbols connect with the hidden parts of the mind, my guide to Carl Jung and symbolism in art goes deeper into that idea.
The Empty Chair at Home
We don’t need a gallery to understand any of this. Most of us have an empty chair somewhere in our lives.
Mine is my grandmother’s. At first, her empty seat at dinner felt strange. But over time, we’ve learned to live alongside the memory of her presence. Now, whoever takes her seat feels a small moment of joy, almost a privilege, as if they’re carrying a little of her with them. I didn’t realise until I started writing this blog that I’d been treating it the same way artists have for centuries: as a place that still belongs to her.
I know I’m not alone in this. Some people keep a chair by the window where a grandparent used to sit and would never dream of selling it. Others leave a seat empty at Christmas, so the absence has a place by the fire, and the room fills with love and laughter in their memory.
What strikes me is how gently these chairs do their work. They don’t demand attention. They simply wait. And in waiting, they remind us that the people we’ve lost haven’t vanished completely. They’ve left their shape behind.
If you have an empty chair that needs some love, take a moment to sit in it. Think about what it meant to the person who used it. Maybe it was a place of reflection, like the chair I sit in for my morning coffee before the day begins.
Is there an empty chair in your life that carries more meaning than its function? Who would you imagine sitting in it?
Perhaps that’s why artists keep returning to this symbol. The chair hasn’t changed. Only the person looking at it has. Two thousand years ago, sculptors carved an empty throne for someone too sacred to show. Fifteen centuries ago, Christians looked up at a golden seat kept ready for a King’s return.
And every morning, I sit in mine with a cup of coffee, taking a moment to breathe. Maybe we’re not so different. We all keep a place for something, or someone, just in case.
