Male Torso

In 1886 the French studios still ran on plaster. A student copied casts of antique sculpture for months, and only then was let near a living model. Van Gogh, newly arrived in Paris and past 30, spent about three months in the studio of Fernand Cormon, a successful painter of historical scenes, and worked through those exercises like everyone else. This is one of roughly a dozen cast studies he painted that year, a male torso in plaster seen from the front and turned slightly to the right, laid in with greys and dull browns on a piece of cardboard about 35 centimetres high. The old catalogue title says exactly that, a plaster figure. He kept the studies instead of discarding them, and they were still in Theo's Paris apartment in the spring of 1887, which is how they reached the museum.