Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette

Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette, often searched as Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette, is a small oil sketch that Vincent van Gogh painted in Antwerp in January or February 1886. It shows the skull and upper vertebrae of an anatomical skeleton with a lit cigarette clamped between its teeth. The canvas measures just 32.3 × 24.8 cm and belongs to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation).

What you're looking at

The skull is seen from the side against a flat, very dark background, with the neck vertebrae and the top of the spine hanging beneath it and the bones of the shoulder at the bottom edge. Light falls across the cranium, so its dome reads as a pale, chalky gray-white while the eye socket and the hollows of the face sink into near-black.

The palette is restricted to blacks, browns, grays and bone whites, the somber Dutch tones Van Gogh had used in Nuenen for The Potato Eaters the year before. The only warm accent in the whole picture is the tiny orange tip of the cigarette, with a thin thread of smoke rising from it. It is a single point of life in a picture of death, and it is placed almost exactly where a living mouth would draw breath.

Look at the mouth: the skull is not grinning in the cartoon sense. The cigarette is simply clamped between the teeth, which are picked out with quick touches of lighter paint. The brushwork overall is fluent and direct, more confident than the careful drawing his academy teachers demanded.

How it was made, and why

Van Gogh enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp in January 1886 and stayed only a few weeks before leaving for Paris at the end of February. Drawing from a skeleton was a standard exercise in nineteenth-century academies, part of learning anatomy before working from the live model. Painting one, however, was not part of the curriculum, so the Van Gogh Museum suggests this picture was made outside lessons.

The cigarette turns a dry exercise into a joke. Most writers read it as a student's irreverent comment on the academy's routine: the skeleton every pupil had to draw has been given a smoke, as if taking a break between poses. Van Gogh never wrote about the picture, so this reading rests on context rather than on his own words.

Meaning: joke, vanitas or self-portrait?

Three interpretations are commonly offered, and they can coexist.

A student prank. The most direct reading, supported by the circumstances: a bored, older student (he was nearly 33) mocking the academic diet of plaster casts and bones.

A vanitas. Skulls have stood for mortality in European art for centuries, especially in Dutch still life, a tradition Van Gogh knew well (see Memento Mori & Vanitas). Smoke and a burning taper or pipe were standard vanitas symbols of life's brevity. Whether or not he intended it, the cigarette fits that language exactly.

A personal note. Van Gogh was a heavy smoker of pipe and cigarettes, and in Antwerp his health was poor; letters to his brother Theo from these months describe exhaustion, bad teeth and an inadequate diet. Some writers therefore see a wry self-reference in the picture. This is a modern reading, plausible but speculative.

A cartoonish taste for the macabre also ran through Belgian art of the period, notably in the work of Félicien Rops and, slightly later, James Ensor, whose skeletons smoke, dance and squabble. There is no evidence Van Gogh was responding to either artist directly, but the painting belongs to the same northern European fondness for death as a comic figure.

Place in Van Gogh's work

The picture is a hinge between two phases. Its dark palette looks back to the Netherlands; within weeks of painting it, Van Gogh was in Paris, where contact with Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism transformed his color. By 1887 he was painting in bright, broken strokes, and by 1888 in Arles he had arrived at the style of Sunflowers and The Night Café. The skeleton is a rare example of humor in an oeuvre more often associated with intensity and anguish.

It remained in the family after his death in 1890 and passed, with the bulk of his estate, to the Vincent van Gogh Foundation, whose collection is on permanent loan to the Van Gogh Museum.

Legacy and popularity

The painting has had an unusually long afterlife on posters, T-shirts and tattoos, helped by its small, iconic format and its blend of gallows humor and art-historical pedigree. It is frequently used in anti-smoking messages, though Van Gogh certainly did not intend it that way. It also appears in many lists of famous Van Gogh paintings and death in art.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Van Gogh Museum, Museumplein, Amsterdam (inventory s0083V1962), and is often on display in the galleries devoted to his early years. Because it is small and light-sensitive works rotate, check the museum's website before visiting. The image is in the public domain.