Torso of Venus

Copying plaster casts of antique sculpture was the first thing any art student of the 1880s was made to do, and Van Gogh came to that exercise late, at 33. In the spring of 1886 he spent a few months in the Paris studio of the painter Fernand Cormon, where mornings went on drawing from casts. In June he took a plaster torso of Venus and painted it five times over, moving around it and starting again from a new angle. Two of those small studies are in the museum. This one is on cardboard rather than canvas, barely larger than a sheet of writing paper, the kind of support you use when the picture is practice and nothing else. He left Cormon's studio after three or four months and did not join another teaching studio.