Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette — About the work

What you are looking at

A student joke from the Antwerp academy, painted while Vincent was bored in anatomy class. The cigarette is the whole point.

It belongs to the Antwerp years and hangs today at Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. The palette runs to bone grey, black, ember red, laid on in strokes you can still count from a metre away — which is exactly why the picture photographs well and reproduces badly.

Why it holds a room

Most nineteenth-century painting asks to be read. Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette asks to be stood in front of. The composition is simple enough to take in at a glance, and the colour does the rest of the work from across the room.

That is also why it works on a wall. A picture that resolves at three metres is a picture that survives being hung above a sofa, where nobody is going to lean in and study the brushwork.

The facts

What this page is for

This is a reference page, not a shop listing. The point is to give you enough about Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette to decide whether you want it on a wall, and enough honesty to know what you would actually be hanging.

Every product we sell that carries this image is listed at the bottom of the page, with the format and the price. If the picture is not for you, the page still stands on its own.

Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette is one of 1 pictures from the Antwerp years in this library. The palette runs to bone grey, black, ember red; the original is at Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. The largest reproduction we print is 60 × 90 cm, which is enough to read the composition and not enough to read every stroke — that is the honest trade a print makes.

Source note: catalogue data from the holding museum; quotations from Vincent van Gogh's correspondence; image files from open-access museum releases where available. Dated, not completed — see the note on dating in the article above.