His style is characterized by thick, convulsive brushwork, through which he could express tenderness as well as turbulent psychological states. There is something of an affinity with van Gogh, although Soutine professed to dislike his work and felt more kinship with the Old Masters whose work he studied in the Louvre: his pictures of animal carcasses, for example, are inspired by Rembrandt's Flayed Ox. However, the gruesome intensity of works such as Side of Beef (1925, Albright-Knox AG, Buffalo) was not gained simply through study of similar pictures, for Soutine visited abattoirs and even brought a carcass into the studio. His neighbours complained of the smell of the rotting meat and called the police, whom Soutine harangued on the subject of how much more important art was than sanitation. The filthy state in which he lived during his years of poverty was notorious: the poet André Salmon recalled that Soutine once consulted a specialist about earache and that ‘In the canal of the painter's ear the doctor discovered, not an abscess, but a nest of bed bugs.’