Agostina Segatori Sitting in the Café du Tambourin
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette, Vincent van Gogh, 1886. Oil on canvas, 32.2 × 24.8 cm. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Public domain.
The image on this page is a studio placeholder, not the painting. The open-access file from Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam replaces it when the gallery's image pipeline runs — we would rather show you a card that says so than a reproduction we have not verified.
Post-Impressionism
Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette
Vincent van Gogh · 1886
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 32.2 × 24.8 cm
- Held by
- Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
- Licence
- Public domain
- Movement
- Post-Impressionism
- Country
- Belgium
The painter
Vincent van Gogh
Van Gogh painted for roughly ten years, and for the first five of them he was not very good. That is worth saying plainly, because the usual telling turns him into a natural whose genius was simply unrecognised. He trained himself late, starting at twenty-seven after failing as an art dealer, a teacher and a lay preacher, and the early Dutch work is dark, thick and often badly drawn — he knew it, and he kept drawing figures for years specifically because he knew it.
Nearby
Related works
The Bedroom
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Café Terrace at Night
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo
The Potato Eaters
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
The Starry Night
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Sunflowers
The National Gallery, London
What to look at
This is a joke, and knowing that it is a joke is most of the pleasure. Van Gogh painted it while enrolled at the Antwerp academy, where students spent long stretches drawing from skeletons as anatomical practice. The painting is what happens when a bored student puts a cigarette between the teeth of the thing he has been copying for weeks. It is small — about the size of a sheet of A4 — and it was never exhibited in his lifetime. Technically it is still a student piece: the brushwork on the ribs is quick and summary, the background is a flat dark field with no space described in it, and the whole thing reads as an exercise. But the colour is already moving. The bone is built from ochre, cream and a surprising amount of pale green, and the cigarette paper is the only pure white on the canvas, which is what pulls your eye straight to the gag.