Soutine

 "As soon as he has a few pennies in his pocket, he would spend them in order to "immerse himself" in music at Colonne or Lamoureux concerts, with a preference for Baroque music.  "

"He haunted the galleries of the Louvre, either hugging the walls or jumping at the slightest approach, and contemplated for hours his favorite painters: 

 "If he loves Fouquet, Raphael, Chardin, and Ingres, it is especially in the works of Goya and Courbet, and more than any other, in those of Rembrandt, that Soutine recognizes himself"   

"After learning French, Soutine — an avid reader of Russian novels — also began to enthusiastically read and immerse himself in French literature, reading Balzac, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud, and later, Montaigne."  

"Soutine once horrified his neighbors by keeping an animal carcass in his studio so that he could paint it (Carcass of Beef). The stench drove them to send for the police, whom Soutine promptly lectured on the relative importance of art over hygiene. 

 There is a story that Marc Chagall saw the blood from the carcass leak out onto the corridor outside Soutine's room, and rushed out screaming, "Someone has killed Soutine."  

"Soutine painted 10 works in this series, which have since become his most well-known.  

 His carcass paintings were inspired by Rembrandt's still life of the same subject, Slaughtered Ox, which he discovered while studying the Old Masters in the Louvre. "    

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"Slaughtered Ox, also known as Flayed Ox, Side of Beef, or Carcass of Beef, is a 1655 oil on beech panel still life painting by Rembrandt. It has been in the collection of the Louvre in Paris since 1857.  

"The painting measures 95.5 by 68.8 centimetres (37.6 in × 27.1 in), and is signed and dated "Rembrandt f. 1655". 

" It shows the butchered carcass of a bull or an ox, hanging in a wooden building, possibly a stable or lean-to shed. The carcass is suspended by its two rear legs, which are tied by ropes to a wooden crossbeam. The animal has been decapitated and flayed of skin and hair, the chest cavity has been stretched open and the internal organs removed, revealing a mass of flesh, fat, connective tissue, joints, bones, and ribs. The carcass is carefully coloured, and given texture by impasto. 

 In the background, a woman appears behind a half-open door, lifting the painting from still life into a genre painting, a scene of everyday life. 

 It is sometimes considered a vanitas or memento mori; some commentators make references to the killing of the fatted calf in the biblical story of the Prodigal Son, others directly to the Crucifixion of Jesus" 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughtered_Ox

 

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"Figure with Meat is a 1954 painting by the Irish-born artist Francis Bacon. 

 The figure is based on the Pope Innocent X portrait by Diego Velázquez; however, in the Bacon painting the Pope is shown as a gruesome figure and placed between two bisected halves of a cow." 

"The fresh meat recalls the lavish arrangements of fruits, meats and confections in 17th-century vanitas paintings, which usually carried subtle moralizing messages about the impermanence of life and the spiritual dangers of sensual pleasures. Sometimes, the food itself showed signs of being overripe or spoiled, to make the point." 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figure_with_Meat