It was either the lobe or the entire ear, gone. The severed ear, or maybe nub, was delivered to a woman, most likely a prostitute, but maybe not.
on the night of December. On October 23, 1888, in the midst of a mental breakdown, Vincent van Gogh cut off part of his own ear. From here on, however, the details spread out, leaving innumerable contradictions in their wake.
“When I started researching Vincent Van Gogh, nothing made sense,” Irish art historian Bernadette Murphy said in a recent interview. “There were endlessly repeated inconsistencies in each book.”
There was only one thing to do, he decided: ignore everything and start over.
that odyssey took murphy to the bancroft library. In 2010, with the help of now-retired Bancroft archivist David Kessler, Murphy made a landmark discovery, resolving decades of controversy over Van Gogh’s self-harm that night. She spent the next six years researching and building his argument, and published the book Van Gogh’s Ear in 2016.
We recently sat down with Murphy, who revealed details of his research during a talk at the Morrison Library last week. She was joined for the talk, titled “The Mystery of Van Gogh’s Ear,” by Kessler and David Faulds, Bancroft Curator of Rare Books and Literary Manuscripts.
here are three things we learned.
1. it was the ear, the whole ear and nothing but the ear.
Until recently, historians had concluded that van gogh only cut the lobe. An eyewitness report seemed unequivocal: French artist Paul Signac, who visited Van Gogh in hospital shortly after the incident, had written in a letter that Van Gogh “cut off the lobe” and “not the whole ear.” p>
but in the self-portraits, van gogh painted himself with his head covered with shrouds. And in his letters, Van Gogh describes spending weeks in hospital recovering from fever and infection.
at the van gogh museum in amsterdam, murphy found an important clue: a letter from 1955 that referred to a diagram of van gogh’s original wound, drawn by felix rey, the doctor who treated him. According to the letter, the diagram was in the possession of biographer Irving Stone, author of the van Gogh biography Lust for Life.
enter bancroft, home of stone’s personal papers. Murphy, based in the South of France, walked over to the library. One day, after several attempts, Kessler found the doctor’s note, folded in half, tucked away in a folder with clippings and other odd bits.
The doctor’s drawing shows a clear incision at the base of the ear; van gogh had cut everything away, leaving only a sliver of the lobe.
“When I first saw the drawing, I burst into tears,” Murphy said. “I thought, all of a sudden, ‘oh my god, he really did.'”
(So where had the story gone wrong? Upon closer inspection of Signac’s letter, Murphy found the answer: a long-overlooked line from his letter. “Vincent was dressed as custom, with a band around the head and a fur coat cap,” Signac writes. “I thought, bingo: no one ever saw the ear uncovered,” Murphy said. “Neither did Signac”).
2. the ear was given to a brothel cleaner, not a prostitute.
for a long time, the accepted story was that van gogh gave the bloody appendage to a woman named rachel, a prostitute at the brothel van gogh frequented while living in arles, southern france.
He gave the woman the ear outside the brothel and, according to a local newspaper report, told her to “guard this item carefully.” he fainted on the spot.
“this girl, she didn’t look for it,” murphy said. “She was traumatized.”
according to murphy’s investigation, the woman was not a prostitute but a cleaner. Murphy checked the Arles census records and found no prostitute named Rachel. She also discovered a news report that the recipient of the ear was named Gaby, not Rachel. Murphy found a woman named Gabrielle, but at the time she was only 18, three years too young to be a registered prostitute.
Murphy tracked down Gaby’s descendants, who told him that Gaby had in fact worked as a maid at the brothel to pay expensive medical bills after being bitten by a rabid dog. Ella Gaby also worked at a café that Van Gogh regularly visited, suggesting a closer connection between the pair than previously believed.
3. the request to kick van gogh out of the yellow house was a farce.
in february 1889, two months after van gogh’s ear was cut off, van gogh’s neighbors in arles launched a petition for the erratic artist to be institutionalized and out of the iconic yellow house, his home and studio. van gogh believed that 80 people had signed the petition, which seriously upset him. but only 30 people had signed it.
early in his research, murphy compiled a database of the 13,000 people who lived in arles during van gogh’s 14-month stay. Tracking down the signatures and searching that database, Murphy concluded that 24 of the 30 signers weren’t even residents of Arles, but acquaintances of the house manager he wanted to get his strange tenant out of.
murphy now uses the database to track the identities of the people van gogh painted while he was in arles, the most important period of his artistic creation.
“It’s like a crossword puzzle,” Murphy said of his ongoing investigation. “You pick it up and you want to finish it.”