The drama of the ear is the best known story about Van Gogh, but it is rife with contradiction. All the keepers of the Van Gogh flame had some sort of investment in his legacy, and their accounts are never entirely dispassionate. I started this project with what seemed a simple question: what exactly did Van Gogh do on the night of 23 December 1888? Van Gogh never mentions the incident directly, but the local newspaper, Paul Gauguin, Theo and later the Impressionist painter Paul Signac all confirm that Vincent injured his ear, though none of these accounts tally concerning exactly what he did. Did he cut off the lobe, part of the ear or the full ear? It seems to me that there is a world of difference between cutting off your earlobe and cutting off your whole ear. Cutting off the lobe could be interpreted as an accidental slip of the hand – crucially, it could be seen as unintentional. If he cut off the whole ear, it was clearly not an accident and speaks volumes about Van Gogh’s state of mind. The ‘whole ear’ theory is certainly the account most favoured by the general public, as it is the more dramatic and better fits the popular image of Van Gogh as ‘the artist who went mad’. It also suggests that Vincent was creating his greatest art while he was losing his mind.
In the aftermath of his breakdown, Vincent did provide some details concerning the extent of the injury. By early January 1889 he had returned from hospital to pick up the threads of his life, writing to Theo from the Yellow House for the first time in two weeks: ‘I hope that I’ve just had a simple artist’s bout of craziness and then a lot of fever following a very considerable loss of blood, as an artery was severed.’ Many years ago I accidentally punctured an artery in my hand while cooking. The violent force of blood spraying everywhere, even reaching the ceiling, was shocking. As I was driven to hospital, I remember being fascinated by the rather agreeable warmth as the blood spurted into my hand each time my heart took a beat. I had cut only a small auxiliary artery and needed a couple of stitches. So I can only imagine what it must have taken for Vincent to staunch the flow of blood on 23 December.
The ear is full of tiny blood vessels that make it one of the most sensitive organs in the body. The main artery that feeds these vessels lies just above the ear. If Vincent had hit an artery, he must have cut the top part of his ear. In which case he suffered serious blood-loss. When the police arrived the next morning, the Yellow House would have had puddles of congealed blood still on the floor. This may explain the high cost of putting the house back in order; Vincent told Theo in mid-January 1889 that the expenses ‘for having all the bedding, bloodstained linen etc. laundered’ was 12 francs 50 centimes, which was more than half a month’s rent.1 This lends credence to the ‘whole ear’ story, but the issues in question do not stop here.
One source of unimpeachable and trustworthy evidence is hospital records. Yet none remain – none that document the various times Van Gogh spent in Arles hospital in 1888 and 1889; none that record the extent of his injuries, or how they were treated. The hospital in Arles moved to a new building in the 1970s and many old records were lost. To my great frustration; the only archival material that remains from Arles hospital in 1888–9 is the four sheets of paper listing the patients who had venereal disease. Because the ear-incident came to the attention of the police, there should also have been a record of it in the police files, but again I found nothing.
Still, there are some things we do know for certain. The first and the easiest question to answer is which ear Van Gogh mutilated. It may seem a small point, but such is the confusion surrounding his story that even on this point there has been dissent. His two self-portraits with bandaged ear, executed early in 1889, are the best known evidence of the incident. At first glance it appears that there is a bandage over the right side of his head, which early on led many to conclude that he had cut his right ear. However, self-portraits are done while looking in the mirror, so clearly it was his left ear that he had wounded.2
In 2009 a new theory about Van Gogh’s ear flashed round the world’s media from two German academics, Hans Kauffmann and Rita Wildegans. They suggested that Paul Gauguin had sliced off Vincent’s ear with a sword and that both men had made a pact of silence about the incident.3 Gauguin was a keen amateur fencer and had brought his equipment with him to Arles (writing to Vincent after he’d left for Paris, ‘at the next opportunity if you can send me by parcel post my 2 fencing masks and gloves, which I left on the shelf in the little upstairs room’).4 There are a number of problems with this theory. There is no clear indication of what type of sword (if any) Gauguin had with him – a foil, sabre or épée, only two of which would be able to slice through flesh. Since there was no other injury on Van Gogh’s body, Gauguin would have had to attack Vincent with Zorro-like precision. And if Gauguin had been responsible for cutting off Vincent’s ear, why on earth would Vincent agree to make a pact of silence about it?
It is generally accepted by most writers that Vincent used a razor, as claimed by Gauguin, yet one key correspondent seems to contradict this. In all things Theo van Gogh is the voice of reason, and his correspondence before and after the incident is almost always reliable. Yet in a letter to his fiancée he says that Vincent used a knife. The original letter was written in Dutch and, since I cannot speak a word of Dutch, I consulted the researchers I had got to know at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Happily, Teio Meedendorp answered my query about the inconsistency Theo’s letter raised about the implement:
In Dutch a cut-throat razor is called a ‘scheermes’ (lit.: razor knife, ‘scheer mes’). In the days of old when the safety razor did not yet exist, cutting your beard was generally referred to as cutting it with the ‘mes’, by which the cut-throat type was meant. So when Theo refers to ‘een mes’ (a knife) with which his brother wounded himself, he could have referred to both the cut-throat razor and a ‘regular’ knife, the first one being more likely of course.5
A doctor friend of mine told me that cutting through an ear with a cut-throat razor would have been like slicing through butter. The ease with which Van Gogh could commit such a brutal act makes me wince.
* * *
The confusion as to how much of his ear Vincent actually cut off began during his lifetime. At first it didn’t occur to me that the difference of opinion might also have a geographical subtext. As I began to reflect on who said what, I realised that the ‘lobe’ idea more often came from the north of Europe and the ‘whole ear’ idea from the south.
The people of the south of France are famous for exaggerating. In the pretty sing-song accent of Provence, many tall tales are told: ‘The fish I caught last week was bigger than a car’ or ‘The mistral blew over my mother.’ The most ridiculous but oft-repeated joke is that ‘A sardine blocked the port of Marseille’. This story is actually true, but what’s not explained is that the Sardine in question was a ship that got stuck in the harbour. Compensating for this Provençal propensity to exaggerate, writers on Van Gogh have tended to play down the incident. Van Gogh historian Marc Edo Tralbaut wrote dismissively in 1969 that ‘The tendency to exaggerate associated with the people of the South should always be taken into account. In fact, it was only a lobe and Gauguin also made the same error when he wrote that he cut off his ear.’6
Yet the accounts from Arles tell a different story. During the 1920s and ’30s anecdotes about Vincent were legion: he chased after women, was always drunk on absinthe, was known as the mad redhead.7 Myth and gossip, together with false anecdotes, have grossly deformed Van Gogh’s time in the city.8 No historian would be blamed for treating the Provençal account of events with caution.
Still, it’s hard to argue with evidence that comes from first-hand accounts and witnesses to the events. Gauguin, who was present before and after the incident, maintained that Van Gogh cut off his whole ear. The only independent account – the local newspaper in Arles – recorded that Vincent ‘handed’ his ear to the prostitute Rachel. Later, this was confirmed by Alphonse Robert, the policeman who was summoned to the brothel that night, who recalled that the girl, ‘in the presence of her boss … handed me a newspaper containing an ear, telling me this is what the painter gave her as a present. I questioned them a little, remembered the package and I found that it contained a whole ear.’9 In theory this account should be foolproof: it came from the policeman who attended the scene and who actually saw the ear itself, but again it was written three decades after the event, and memory is unreliable.
Alphonse Robert’s account was published in an article on the drama of the ear, written by two psychiatrists, Dr Edgar Leroy and Dr Victor Doiteau in 1936. At the time Dr Leroy was running the rest home in Saint-Rémy where Van Gogh had spent the last full year of his life. Despite Robert’s testimony, the two doctors concluded that Vincent had cut off only part of the ear, including the lobe. To illustrate their argument they included an anatomical drawing with an arrow drawn through the ear.10
Illustration of Vincent’s ear from the article by Edgar Leroy and Victor Doiteau, 1936
To slice across and down, alongside the face, is almost impossible. I tried to re-create the movement and couldn’t, without twisting myself in knots; I wasn’t in a frenzy of mania, it is true, but such a slice seemed to require precision, not passion. I contacted Dr Leroy’s son and over lunch asked him about his father’s article. ‘My father got one of his students to do the drawing,’ he told me. ‘I never thought it was meant to be an exact illustration of what Van Gogh did.’11 But why include such a precise drawing? The story gets stranger still. Although the article concluded that Vincent cut off only part of the ear, Dr Leroy claimed something different in a personal letter to Irving Stone, whom he had met on Stone’s trip to Provence in 1930 to research the book that would become Lust for Life.12 After Stone returned to New York, the two men corresponded. Explaining that he was preparing an article on Van Gogh with Victor Doiteau, Leroy wrote, ‘we state that Vincent cut off the whole ear’.13 So why did he change his mind when he published his article some six years later? I wondered whether pressure had been put on the two doctors to modify their version of the facts, or whether there was another reason to reject the account told to them in Provence. Had they been encouraged to change their copy and, if so, by whom? This is when the Van Gogh family enters the story.
We have Jo, Theo’s young wife, to thank for Van Gogh’s legacy, for preserving his work and his correspondence. We may also have her to thank for unwittingly creating confusion as to how badly Van Gogh mutilated his ear that night. A confusion that has lasted more than a century. Through Theo, Jo was privy to all the details of Vincent’s illness after his breakdown and must have known exactly what Vincent had done. Moreover, she had met Vincent in Paris when he stayed in her apartment on his way to Auvers for three days in May 1890, and again a few weeks later when the family went to visit him there.14 In 1914 Jo wrote in her introduction to Vincent’s letters what Dr van Tilborgh had told me: that only ‘a piece of the ear’ was cut off.15
Another person who knew in detail about Van Gogh’s injury was a man who met the artist just seven weeks before his death. Dr Paul Gachet of Auvers-sur-Oise considered himself an artist. He specialised in engraving and taught Van Gogh what little he knew of the technique. He even drew a sketch of Vincent on his deathbed, which he dedicated to Theo van Gogh. There are three versions of this drawing, of which the first (seen in Chapter 3) was given to Theo as a souvenir for his mother.16 This sketch was done in haste in a very hot room within hours of Vincent’s death, and although simply an outline, it does seem to support the idea that most of the ear remained. Yet on closer inspection the rough lines that show the ear could just as well be part of a pillow. Gachet further confused the issue when he produced an etching, after his own deathbed drawing, showing most of the upper ear intact.
Branding themselves experts on all things Van Gogh, the Gachet family certainly had a lot more to do with Vincent after his death than they ever did in his lifetime. Paul Gachet fils was regularly interviewed by Van Gogh scholars after his father died in 1909. Just seventeen when Vincent had lived in Auvers, he was a controversial figure who flagrantly exploited his contact with Van Gogh, no matter how tenuous it was.17 When questioned in 1922 about the painter’s injury, he maintained, ‘It wasn’t the whole ear and if I recall correctly, it was a good part of the outer ear (more than the lobe) (An ambiguous reply, you’ll say.)’18 Later he augmented this: ‘The mutilation could be seen on the left side only – and could not be seen face-on. It wasn’t even noticed by people older than me who saw Vincent in Auvers!’19 Perhaps this is the only quote from Gachet fils that is truly significant: that Vincent’s injury was not particularly noticeable.
Through all this fog of opinion it is hard to know what to believe. Each account comes laden with reasons to trust and reasons to doubt. The most widely accepted version of how Vincent wounded himself comes from the artist Paul Signac, who was unimpeachable as a witness. He had spent time with Van Gogh shortly after the incident and was, crucially, not personally invested in the incident. Everyone else – Gauguin, Jo van Gogh, even the Gachets – had something to gain or lose from Van Gogh’s legacy. Signac stated unequivocally that Vincent ‘cut off the lobe (and not the whole ear)’,20 despite contradictory evidence from policeman Robert, Paul Gauguin and the local newspaper. Yet, Signac became recognised as the acceptable source of what Vincent did that night; and thanks to Signac, and Jo’s ambiguous remark, the official line from the Van Gogh Museum is that Vincent cut off the lower part of the ear. As I weighed each account, I began to think that the question of what Vincent had done that night might never be successfully resolved.
* * *
After my first trip to Amsterdam, while filing the photocopies I had taken there, I noticed something that sparked my interest. It was a single line in a letter from 1955 and it set me on a trail to a library in the United States.21 In early 2010 I again emailed archivist David Kessler at the Bancroft Library at the University of California – that housed Irving Stone’s papers:
[21 January 2010: 9.37 a.m., France; 00.37 a.m., USA]
Dear David,
I corresponded with you late last year concerning my research project on Van Gogh. After working in Amsterdam, I came across a reference in a letter written by Time Life concerning Mr Stone’s papers that interests me greatly. I am looking for copies of any correspondence (in French) between Mr Stone and Dr Félix Rey of Arles.
There is mention of a drawing done for Stone by Dr Rey of Van Gogh’s ear on a prescription form. I imagine it would be on headed paper, with his address (he lived at rue de Rampe but I imagine his office was elsewhere) and a signature. Do you have ANYTHING that looks like this? I am desperate to get hold of it.
I would be most grateful for any help you can give me, Bernadette
Dr Félix Rey was a young doctor in Arles and the first person to treat Van Gogh when he arrived at the hospital on 24 December 1888. The likelihood of Stone having kept the drawing, given how rigorous he had been in discarding his other material, was slim. But the possibility was too exciting to disregard. I couldn’t quite believe that there might perhaps be – tucked away in an archive in California – a drawing of exactly what lay under that bandage.
David’s reply came promptly:
[8.14 a.m., USA; 5.14 p.m., France]
You will remember that the last time you inquired I made a thorough search of the relevant boxes (91–92) for research material concerning Van Gogh. I found almost nothing … very little remains of Mr Stone’s research material … except for his card file notes and research correspondence. I will retrieve the two boxes from offsite storage again and have another look.
Not being in California, and able to look through the documents myself, was maddening. I knew that Stone had the document as late as 1955, the year of the Time Life piece and twenty-five years after he’d met Dr Rey. He died in 1989; I only hoped he’d kept it that long. We corresponded several times that day and David asked me if I had any ideas about where in the collection it might be so I checked the library index online and wrote to him with my thoughts. That evening after asking him if he would mind going through the material one last time, I had an email from David:
[11.01 a.m., USA; 8.01 p.m., France]
Having looked at a lot of the family stuff over the years, I find it pretty inconceivable that the material would be there. It is very specifically personal stuff, involving family. I see no folder in these seven boxes that would seem to be an obvious place to look. I particularly notice the painful detail that has been lavished upon this collection, down to minutiae about individual items. It’s hard for me to believe that something as startling and pointed as the drawing you want would be buried unnoticed and passed over in a miscellany … I think it probable that the clippings in box 531 are just that, but it won’t hurt to have a look!
David
That night I barely slept.
[22 January 2010: 9.12 a.m., USA; 6.12 p.m., France]
Vous n’allez pas le croire, mais j’ai trouvé le dessin que vous cherchez!!!22 Isn’t that something. It was the 3rd document in the 1st folder in the box, which certainly saved me time as I had resolved to go through it document by document. The address (you describe the document well without seeing it) printed at the top is Docteur Rey Félix, 6, Rampe du Pont, Arles-sur-Rhône, and it’s dated 18 août 1930. :-)
David
I wired the library payment for a scan of the document and then had to wait for a few days until it could be processed and sent to me. When I received it early one morning via email, I started to shake.
It was extraordinary, incredible and wonderful … I began to walk circles around the room. From the beginning I had given my project the working title ‘Van Gogh’s Ear’ and resolved to find out what lay under his bandage, but I hadn’t imagined finding anything that actually answered my question and embodied my project so perfectly. It was uncanny. The prescription form was signed and dated by the very doctor who had dressed the wound. This document was not conjecture, but tangible proof; it explained not only what Vincent had done, but how. As I paced around my living room on that cold winter morning, I could not believe that I had found new information about Vincent van Gogh.
Tangible proof or not, I needed to confirm its authenticity before I got too carried away. I found the signature of Dr Rey on one of the photos I had taken in the archives and compared it to the one on the prescription form. They were identical.
Signature of Dr Rey, 1930
Signature of Dr Rey, 1912
I wanted to check one more instance, but there was no marriage certificate online or any record of Dr Rey’s children’s births. I found him on the electoral register and in a trade directory, so at least I could verify his address. The prescription form gave his office as ‘6, Rampe du Pont’.23 The archive sources confirmed this. But there was still the issue of timing. It was dated 18 August 1930; Irving Stone had met Dr Rey some forty years after he had treated Vincent van Gogh. In my family we often disagree about an event just a few years in the past and have different memories of how something played out; I was worried that the doctor’s recollection of the wound might have been distorted. Unless I could prove beyond any doubt that Rey had recalled Vincent’s injury correctly, my document was worthless. I needed to do further research to prove the document was an accurate record of what had taken place on 23 December 1888.
After pacing around the house for most of the morning, I telephoned a few trustworthy friends for advice. I finally decided I needed to talk to an expert, so I called Louis van Tilborgh from the Van Gogh Museum. I pleaded with him not to tell to anyone about what I was going to tell him. Louis was polite, but wary. I learned later that the Museum is contacted several times a day about new ‘paintings’ and ‘major discoveries’, so his reaction was perfectly understandable. In retrospect, Louis was amazing; he listened to me patiently and with great respect as I described my find. After a lot of questions, a long discussion and the promise to keep it under wraps, I emailed him a scan of my precious document. He called back within minutes and we discussed the implications of the prescription form which lays to rest a discussion that has been going on for more than a century.
* * *
In August 1930 the American novelist Irving Stone went to see Dr Félix Rey at his surgery, at 6, rue Rampe du Pont in Arles. Born Irving Tannenbaum in 1903 (he later adopted his stepfather’s surname), Stone was a great believer that education was the only way to succeed in life. After getting a degree he married a fellow student from Berkeley and, thanks to a generous gift from his wealthy father-in-law, travelled to Europe. In the summer of 1930 he was in Provence with his wife, who suggested the title for a book he was researching at the time: Lust for Life. Initially rejected by seventeen publishers, the novel made Stone’s reputation when it came out in 1934.
In 1930 Dr Rey still worked at the hospital in Arles, which was in the same rundown building that Vincent had known in 1888. He was no longer the fresh-faced intern who had met Van Gogh, but was now a sixty-five-year-old doctor on the verge of retiring. He worked for a few hours each month at the hospital, and ran his private practice from the sprawling family home at 6, rue Rampe du Pont. This was where Irving Stone went to meet him on 18 August 1930.
After Vincent had died, other writers went to Arles on the trail of Van Gogh, a number of whom had spoken to Dr Rey. Many of these early writers, such as Julius Meier-Graefe and Gustave Coquiot, had kept notes of their meeting with the doctor.24 Stone went one better: he asked Dr Rey if he would kindly draw an illustration of Vincent’s injury. Dr Rey tore off a page from his prescription pad and, using a black ink pen and in the manner of a doctor, hastily drew two diagrams of Vincent van Gogh’s ear, both before and after the injury. He added a note at the bottom of the page:
I’m happy to be able to give you the information you have requested concerning my unfortunate friend Van Gogh. I sincerely hope that you won’t fail to glorify the genius of this remarkable painter, as he deserves,
Cordially yours,
Dr Rey.25
It seems strange that a small piece of paper found in the bowels of a Californian archive could change the direction of my life. It is hard to look back and think about the time before I found the drawing, and how different my world is now. My adventure had started with a simple question: what exactly lay under the bandage? I never imagined I’d actually be able to answer it so conclusively. Yet my investigation was by no means at an end. I needed to find further contemporary proof of Vincent’s injury. If I were to understand fully the circumstances that had brought Vincent to this crisis and why Signac, Gachet and the Van Gogh family had all emphatically maintained that he cut off only part of the ear, I needed to continue my research: how had the story gone so awry?
Vincent van Gogh’s ear, drawn by Dr Félix Rey for Irving Stone, 18 August 1930. The annotation on the first drawing reads: ‘The ear was sliced with a razor following the dotted line.’ On the second drawing it reads: ‘The ear showing what remained of the lobe.’