Van Gogh, Vincent - Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette (1886)

The Practical Joke of Mortality

Vincent van Gogh was rotting in Antwerp when he painted this. It was 1886 and he was stuck in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts with teachers who were obsessed with the dead rules of the past. They forced students to spend their days sketching Greek statues and plaster casts while the real world was falling apart outside the gates. Vincent was bored. He was also in physical agony with failing health and teeth that were literally falling out of his head.

This skeleton isn't just a clinical study of bones. It’s Van Gogh flipping the bird at the Academy des Beaux-Arts, juvenile humor at the expense of the boring anatomy drills of the men who controlled the art world. By sticking a lit cigarette between those grinning teeth, Vincent turned a cold academic exercise into a companion. He was himself a heavy smoker who lived on coffee and tobacco. He saw the cigarette as a friend in a cold, stone city that smelled of coal fire and stale beer.

The painting is a memento mori for a cynical age. Evolution was already common knowledge, and the question of humanity’s origins were linked not to the Divine, but to the animal existence. Photography had made portraits of the deceased a common household item. Life expectancy for the working class was a grim gamble, and Vincent knew his time was short. He painted the skull to show that even in death, the fire still burns.

References

Naifeh, Steven and Gregory White Smith. Van Gogh: The Life. New York: Random House, 2011.

Silverman, Debora. Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.

Van Gogh, Vincent. The Letters of Vincent van Gogh. Edited by Ronald de Leeuw. London: Penguin Classics, 1997.

Walther, Ingo F. and Rainer Metzger. Van Gogh: The Complete Paintings. Cologne: Taschen, 2010.