Skull

A skull painted straight on against yellow, made in Paris in 1887. Van Gogh painted two of them that year, and they work as colour exercises before anything else, with the yellow and green laid in behind and the bone built from small separate dabs, a touch he was picking up from the painters around him in the city. The motif had come into his work earlier, by an ordinary route. At the academy in Antwerp in 1886 he practised anatomy by drawing skeletons, which was standard training for a student, and out of that came his small canvas of a skeleton's head with a lit cigarette between its teeth. Nothing of that joke survives here. The skull is set up the way he would set up a jug or a pair of boots, and the second one from that year, seen from the side against the same yellow, is in the same museum in Amsterdam.