Easy to learn as checkers? sure. Easy to play as checkers? yeah… maybe not so much 
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I Haz KO!
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Compare:
Goya, the sleep of reason creates monsters…
To:
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Empress Xiaoqin Playing Weiqi, Qing Dynasty (1644-1911AD), Collection of Palace Museum Beijing
The cosmos is a [weiqi] board,
The battlefield of Black and White —
Trivial as worms and ants,
Great as marquises and kings. (650)
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Notice, the Empress sits, but her opponent stands, in keeping with courtly propriety, I imagine.
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And the Empress figure is noticeably larger, which was the way status was indicated in Asian art at the time.
Mogadeet
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Loving these. The one with the chair though … is that really a Go image? It looks like a story about hard times and how they had to burn the chair for … some reason?
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Your guess is as good as mine, but I found the motif on the chair to be distincly reminescent of a goban… So I decided to share, without having the slightest understanding :D. Maybe the depression goes far deeper showing a man so poor he had to turn a goban into a chair and then getting even poorer and as to having to burn the goban chair to keep warm 
WHO KNOWS!
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Zooming into the chair:
definitely not a Goban but probably a cane seat chair, like this:
And the text:
Bernard Palissy, inventor of enameled pottery, burns chairs to keep the furnace going
Here it is in higher resolution:
More interesting info about Palissy:
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Don’t mean to be a spoilsport, but perhaps the pattern on the chair is just wickerwork. The English note at the bottom says, “Bernard [?], inventor of enameled pottery burns chairs to keep the furnace going. [?] Published by the Department of [antiquities?].” No clue there, unfortunately. I wonder what the Chinese text at the top says.
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@trohde: Amazing. We both hit on the idea at the same time. You somehow got much better resolution out of the photo, however.
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Well, I’ve sat on many such chairs, so it was clear to me 
It only took me so long to post it b/c I needed to find the English term for such a seating surface.
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Reminds me, BTW, how once I had to burn shelves in a very cold winter — I think it was in 1996, –26,5° C (–15.7 F) — in order to keep the masonry heater going … didn’t have the money to buy firewood 
)
(And sorry for that much OT )
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Granted, I am no chair expert, neither an expert on japanese culture, but I have yet to see a wicker chair with a solid wooden frame like that. And were they even a thing for a lowly potter at that time? You guys and your reality is boring
My story was much more fun…
Now you’re gonna go ahead and tell me the nice lady is not actually sawing a go game to her husband’s kimono 
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Being quite off-topic now but I guess I sat on some of those too. My grandma had those sort of chairs when I was little.
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Hmmmm 
okay then. I am out of arguments 
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That chair is appears to be 21x21 rather than 19x19 anywy.
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