Pops

Nobody is in the picture, and that is the point. Two armchairs sit in the room, one at the back and one in the foreground, each with a newspaper, each with a mug on the small table beside it, and a pair of reading glasses left on one of the tables.

Pops is what a father or grandfather becomes in a family that has settled on it. In a house that has one, certain things stay where he left them: a chair nobody else takes, the paper in its place, the cup within reach.

The word has a famous owner. Louis Armstrong was known as Pops, a nickname that came from his own habit of forgetting people's names and calling them Pops instead.

The room is laid in loose, dry strokes of brown, rust and cream, with a patch of dark blue behind the far chair. In the upper chair a newspaper lies open on the leather seat, with a mug and the glasses on the table beside it; in the lower chair a mug and a second paper sit on the arm table. POPS is lettered by hand in navy across the middle.