Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette

Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette, titled Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette by the Van Gogh Museum, is a small oil painting on canvas by Vincent van Gogh, made in Antwerp in January–February 1886 and now in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation). It measures 32.3 × 24.8 cm.

In Antwerp Van Gogh attended classes at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, which he later said were boring and had taught him nothing. Drawing skeletons was a standard academy exercise for learning anatomy, but painting them was not part of the curriculum, so the museum concludes that he made this picture on his own, between or after lessons. The canvas itself is undated.

The head and shoulders of a skeleton emerge from a black background, the skull turned in three-quarter view with a lit cigarette clamped between its teeth. The museum calls it a juvenile joke, and it is often read as a satirical comment on conservative academic routine; at the same time it shows how well Van Gogh already understood anatomy. Others see it as a vanitas or memento mori, painted when he was himself in poor health, and possible echoes of the Belgian artist Félicien Rops or the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Hercules Segers have been suggested. It is sometimes taken as a warning against smoking, but Van Gogh was a keen smoker himself until his death in 1890.

The picture went to Theo van Gogh in Paris after February 1886 and stayed in the family until 1962, when it passed to the Vincent van Gogh Foundation; it was lent to the Stedelijk Museum until the Van Gogh Museum opened in 1973. He also drew a hanging skeleton and a cat in Antwerp, and in 1887–88 painted two more pictures with skulls, his only other paintings of the motif. In 2026 it was on loan to the Fondation Vincent van Gogh in Arles for the exhibition SUSPECTS - Van Gogh, Tricksters & Co.