Van Gogh Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette 1886 T-Shirt

Van Gogh painted this in Antwerp in the winter of 1885 into 1886, while enrolled at the academy and being made to draw skeletons, and he was not enjoying it.

So he put a cigarette in one. It is a student’s joke at the expense of an anatomy class, painted years before the sunflowers and the wheatfields, by a man in his early thirties who was living badly, eating worse, and had recently had a dentist remove several teeth. It has since become the most-reproduced memento mori in art because it is funny, and because it is also — knowing what came nine years later — not funny at all.

Daddy wears it and does not editorialise. The shirt is doing enough.

The shirt itself is the good kind of basic: combed ring-spun cotton, preshrunk, side-seamed so it hangs straight, taped shoulders so the collar doesn’t twist after the fortieth wash. It fits like the tee you’ve had for ten years, on day one.

How to wear it

Black tee, black jeans, boots. It is an evening shirt and it does not want to be styled cheerfully.