Skull

A skull was ordinary studio equipment in the 1880s. Anatomy belonged to the training, and Van Gogh had worked from a skeleton at the Antwerp academy a year or two before this, once painting it with a lit cigarette between its teeth. Here the thing is set square to the viewer on a canvas about 40 centimetres high, and it comes from his last Paris winter, 1887 into 1888, the months before he took the train south to Arles. The motif is rare in his work. Two more paintings and a drawing from that same short stretch, and then he left it alone. One of them, a second skull very close to this one, hangs in the same museum, which is a lot of attention for a subject he treated only that once.