In 1886 Vincent van Gogh painted a skull with a lit cigarette between its teeth, and people have been trying to work out why ever since... At first glance it looks like a warning: a grinning head of bone against a dark background, smoke rising from the cigarette as if death itself were taking a break. Some see it as a reminder of how short life is, others as a comment on his own failing health, and others again as a jab at the stiff art school he was attending. The museum that owns it, though, offers a much simpler answer: the Van Gogh Museum calls it “a juvenile joke.” He painted it that winter, at 32, while he was studying at the art academy in Antwerp. Drawing skeletons was a standard exercise there, a way for students to learn anatomy, and the painting shows that Van Gogh had a good command of it. But painting them was not part of the lessons, so he must have made this one in his own time, as if he had taken the most serious exercise in the academy and decided to give it a cigarette... The joke has a darker side, though, because that winter Van Gogh was in terrible shape. He was poor, exhausted and barely eating, his teeth were breaking off, and in a letter to his brother Theo he admitted that he had “made it worse by smoking a great deal,” because it helped him forget how hungry he was. So when he gave a skull a lit cigarette, he may have been laughing at himself a little too. And yet for Van Gogh, tobacco was never really a symbol of death. He smoked his pipe all his life and loved it, and two years later, from his little yellow house in Arles, he wrote that the most beautiful paintings are “those one dreams of while smoking a pipe in one’s bed.” In his hands, that tiny glowing cigarette might not be a warning at all, but a small, stubborn spark of life in the mouth of death...