Torso of Venus

In January 1886 Van Gogh enrolled at the academy in Antwerp, where the drill was drawing from plaster casts of antique sculpture. By the start of March he was in Paris, still working from casts, now with no teacher standing over him. He painted a series of small studies of plaster figures that year, and this standing Venus torso was the one he kept returning to: at least five studies of it are known, two of them now in Amsterdam. Anatomy was no longer the exercise. He was testing what a white object does when the colour behind it changes, so the same torso comes back with a different background each time. These studies are all much the same modest size, around 35 by 27 centimetres, the format he also used for the flower pieces of that summer.