Tove Jansson

The painting "The Chairs" came to Birgitta Ulfsson and Lasse Pöysti's home in Friherrs in the early 1960s.
It hung in the centre of the living room's large back wall among a lot of other paintings.
On the back Tove has called the painting "The Chairs". In the family we sometimes called it "The blue chairs", "All is not well chairs" and most often "The angry chairs".

The painting is theatrical, there is a secret, a story, an atmosphere and a feeling that something has happened...with Tove's sarcasm in the background. Although the blue chairs look like they belong to the same set of furniture, the atmosphere between them is not the best.
It is easy to understand that something has happened that has caused the chairs not to "look" at each other but rather to despise each other.
Someone has said, insinuated, used the wrong word, or expressed a presumptuous sentence or look that hurt the other, resulting in an exit.
Tove and Tooti had an agreement among themselves that they could never say "I told you so".
Something similar must have happened for the chairs to end up in this position.
With Tove's sarcasm, one can easily understand that just by slightly swivelling the chairs, more towards each other, the painting would be called "A place for friends"

But then this would have been a completely different painting.

"What do you think happened next?"

Tom Pöysti