Flying Fox

A flying fox is a big fruit bat from the tropics, and there were none in the air over Nuenen, the Brabant village where Van Gogh was renting rooms and working in the autumn of 1885. What stood in front of him was a mounted specimen with the wings pinned open, which accounts for the stiffness of the pose. Animals like this arrived in the Netherlands preserved, through the colonial trade, and Van Gogh knew a man in nearby Eindhoven, the retired goldsmith Antoon Hermans, who kept more than 300 mounted exotic creatures. The museum thinks the bat may well have come from there. He put a light behind the wings so the membrane reads as translucent. The canvas is 79 centimetres wide against 41 tall, and when he left for Antwerp a few weeks later the painting stayed behind with his mother.