Tête de squelette à la cigarette allumée

In the winter of 1885 into 1886 Van Gogh was enrolled at the art academy in Antwerp, and he hated it. The teaching bored him, and he later said it taught him nothing. Students there drew skeletons as a standard anatomy exercise, but nobody painted them. Van Gogh did anyway, and then he stuck a lit cigarette between the skeleton's teeth. The Van Gogh Museum calls it a juvenile joke, a young man's dig at a stiff academic routine he had no patience for. There's nothing gloomy or symbolic being worked out here. The bones are painted quickly and confidently, the jaw set at a faintly cheerful angle, the little curl of smoke the only soft thing in it. He would leave Antwerp for Paris a few weeks later and never take a formal class again.