Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette
Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890) · January to February 1886
A human skeleton, seen from the shoulders up, turns slightly toward you with a lit cigarette clamped between its teeth. It is a small, dark, funny picture, painted in Antwerp in the winter of 1886 when Vincent was briefly a student at the academy there. Skeletons were standard equipment in the drawing classes, where students learned anatomy by copying them, and Vincent seems to have taken the school prop and given it a smoke.
The painting is quick and sure. The bones are built up in strokes of cream, grey and brown over a background of near black, and the cigarette is a single bright stroke of white with a tiny point of orange at its tip. Look at the way the jaw is painted slightly open to hold the cigarette, and at the highlights on the forehead and cheekbone, which give the skull a real sense of turning in the light. There is nothing careful about it; it looks like an afternoon's work, and it probably was. Vincent was thirty two, had already ruined his teeth and was living on bread and coffee and tobacco.
The skull is usually read as a joke about the academy, which Vincent found stuffy and left within weeks, and perhaps a joke about himself and his smoking. Skulls also belong to an old tradition of vanitas pictures that remind the viewer that life is short, and the cigarette gives that tradition a modern twist. It is one of the most popular works in the museum with younger visitors, and the shop sells it on more objects than almost anything else. It comes just before the Paris rooms, and it is a good picture to look at before the colour arrives, because it shows how much Vincent could do with almost none.
Did You Know? Vincent was a heavy pipe smoker and had lost about ten teeth by the time he painted this, so the joke may have been on himself.
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