Plaster Cast of a Woman's Torso

Copying plaster casts was the opening drill in every academy, handed to beginners long before they were let near a living model. Van Gogh had gone through it in Antwerp and again in Paris, and by the spring of 1887 he was doing it at home, in the flat he shared with his brother Theo on the rue Lepic in Montmartre. He kept a few small casts there, antique Venus figures among them, and painted them more than once. From a step back this torso reads as white porcelain. Close up it is put together from thin strokes of green, orange, red and purple, the palette he was picking up from the Paris painters he had started to meet. The canvas was still in the flat when Theo died in 1891, and it passed to Theo's widow with the rest of the family holding.