Beef and calf's head

In the early 1920s the American collector Albert Barnes walked into Paul Guillaume's gallery in Paris and bought some 50 Soutines at once, which changed the painter's life. Soutine had come from a poor Jewish family near Minsk and had lived for years on almost nothing. Now he could have a whole beef carcass carried up to his studio and hung there to work from, and he did it about ten times around 1925, until the neighbours complained of the smell and the sanitation men were called. He said afterwards that what he wanted to get out of the carcass was the scream he had heard as a child when a butcher killed a goose in front of him, and that he had failed to get it. He was working from Rembrandt's flayed ox, which he went to look at in the Louvre.