Torso of Venus

In 1882, in The Hague, Van Gogh was being taught by Anton Mauve, an established painter and a relative by marriage. Within about a month the two had fallen out, and by most accounts the quarrel was over drawing from plaster casts, the standard beginner's exercise Van Gogh would not take seriously.

Four years later he was doing it by choice. He reached Paris in the spring of 1886 and enrolled in the studio of the painter Fernand Cormon, where students copied plaster torsos before they were let near a living model. This female torso was the cast he kept coming back to. He painted it five times, each time from a different angle, and the Van Gogh Museum holds more than one of the results, which is why a visitor can walk past what looks like the same object twice.

He owned about a dozen casts of that kind, classical and Renaissance figures bought cheaply, and they went on turning up in his still lifes after he had left the studio.