After working for several months on my own in France, preparing what I thought was a fairly complete chronology of the artist’s time in Arles, I felt ready to set off for the archives at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. At the time I was under the impression that I knew quite a lot about Vincent van Gogh and hoped that I would find a straight-forward answer, somewhere in the museum’s archives, to the most perplexing of my questions: what exactly had Vincent cut off? Apart from the famous self-portraits showing Van Gogh with a bandaged ear, I still hadn’t been able to find any further contemporary information to go on other than the local newspaper that had published the story.
There were a number of points that I hoped I could clarify during my trip and in the back of my mind I had a wild hope that the search for the truth about ‘Van Gogh’s Ear’ might make an interesting subject for a documentary film or a newspaper article. Since the museum was the world authority on Van Gogh, I assumed its scholars had already investigated every aspect of Vincent’s life and there was nothing new to be uncovered, and certainly not by me. Before I left I read a 1930s French article about his ear, written by two psychiatrists who had studied Vincent’s pathology. With no access to a major archive nearby, I was lucky one of the doctor’s sons, Robert Leroy, lived close to me and kindly sent me a copy of the article.1 It included an eyewitness account that was new to me: the recollections of a local policeman who had been called to the red-light district on 23 December 1888.
It was late November and already deep winter in Amsterdam when I arrived. As I left the airport it began to snow. It is a myth that we only have hot and balmy days in the south of France. Provence can get bitterly cold during the winter months, catching the visitor unawares. With a heavy frost and no cloud cover, it can regularly reach −10°C overnight. But even in the depths of winter, the sky is almost always a deep blue, and the light is particular – brighter than in the summer, as the dust in the air is blown away by the force of the local wind.
So under a horribly depressing grey northern European sky, I made my way to the building next to the Van Gogh Museum, where the research library is housed. I had corresponded with Fieke Pabst, a gentle, smiling woman who welcomed me warmly that wintry morning. As my time was limited, I had ordered all the files that I thought might be useful in understanding Van Gogh’s first breakdown in 1888. Some of the boxed files I had requested were waiting for me on my table in the reading room. I was also given a list of all the documents that the library possessed, and eagerly ordered lots more. As Fieke continued adding to my pile, we chatted about my project and she asked me why I had begun my research. I muttered something about my sister’s death and she whispered, ‘Cancer?’ I nodded. ‘Me too, my sister died last year,’ she said and then, ‘Let’s have lunch.’ In that instant, Fieke became a very dear friend.
The damp, cold weather and the night drawing in so early meant that I barely saw daylight during the four days I spent in Amsterdam. I felt low and melancholy. My subdued mood was compounded by the piles of boxes awaiting me each morning at the library. I thought my original idea had been fairly simple and uncomplicated: to research the night Vincent cut off part of his ear. As I ploughed through the files, I realised I couldn’t begin to understand one night in 1888 when I barely knew anything about Van Gogh or his contemporaries.
As I read, I began to understand the story in a different way. In 1970 the Museum’s academic journal, Vincent, focused on the events that took place in Arles at the end of 1888 and in early 1889, and printed in full some of the letters to Theo from Vincent’s friends and from the doctor who treated him in Arles. The letters from Vincent’s friend Joseph Roulin, who worked at the Arles post office, his doctor, Dr Félix Rey, and the protestant pastor of Arles, Reverend Salles, were really interesting as they kept Theo informed of his brother’s progress, bearing witness to events as they were actually happening. Until then, I had only come across extracts from these letters. Reading them through completely, in their original French, gave me a whole new perspective on the aftermath of Vincent’s breakdown.
Towards the end of that first day in Amsterdam I opened a file entitled ‘Ear’. I skimmed through the first few pages. Suddenly I felt sick. In the file was an article by the journalist Martin Bailey, from a highly respected art magazine.2 It included the famous portrait of Vincent with a bandaged ear, and even used the title ‘Van Gogh’s Ear’ on its cover. My heart sank. Not only did the article go over every single aspect of the story that I understood up to that point: questioning what Vincent had cut off, the name of the girl to whom he gave his mutilated ear, and Gauguin’s conflicting accounts, it had already been published. It made my quest utterly redundant. I sat for a while in the library, numb. My hunt had come to a very abrupt end. I was devastated. This was only my first day, and I had no idea what I was going to do next.
Just before the library shut at 5 p.m., Fieke came by my desk. We talked briefly about the article I had discovered and, at my request, she gave me Martin Bailey’s email address. She also asked whether I had been into the museum yet and when I replied ‘No’, she kindly offered me a ticket so that I could pop in to see the paintings next door. Although I had seen some of Van Gogh’s works elsewhere, I had never had the opportunity to see a large number of Vincent’s paintings all together. As I walked into the large modern building someone muttered an unintelligible greeting in Dutch and I rushed inside. With only an hour left before the building closed, I moved quickly through the galleries, taking in early works from Holland and Belgium. Those paintings were dark and sombre and they mirrored my mood. As I rounded the corner into another room, I was stopped in my tracks. Above the paintings on the wall, I read the words:
‘I feel a failure’ – Vincent van Gogh.3
I stared at the words for several minutes. My morale was so low that I had begun to doubt I could bring anything new to his story. I had spent the past ten months working on a project that someone else had already done. Suddenly I was full of empathy for this troubled man I had never met. In that moment the artist was transformed by the realisation that he, one of the most revered painters in the world, had felt like a failure. He was no longer simply the subject matter of my research. Vincent van Gogh had become real.
Then I turned another corner and suddenly I was home, back in the south of France, bathed in the sunlight and images I know so well. The canvases were bright and full of life. I wandered around slowly, savouring every painting. They were so much more intense than I had ever imagined. In a strange country, feeling overwhelmed and stunned by Vincent’s paintings, I was deeply moved. Back in the warmth and the sun of Provence, quite unexpectedly, I started to cry.
In my rented flat that night, I emailed Martin Bailey, explaining my research project and offering to give him all my material to date. He wrote back saying that the offer was most gracious, but he had no intention of doing any more work on the ear in the foreseeable future. It gave me a little glimmer of hope. I spent the evening reading his article carefully and I was intrigued by something that I hadn’t yet uncovered: mention of a second press article about the ear-story. This was a tiny newspaper cutting sent to one of Vincent’s friends, the Belgian painter Eugène Boch. It had lain hidden in an envelope in the Royal Archives in Belgium until Bailey had found it.4 At first it didn’t appear that there was much new:
Arles – The crackpot: Last Wednesday, under this heading we related the story of a Polish painter who had cut his ear with a razor and had given it to a girl who worked in a café. Today we learned that this painter is in a hospital, where he suffers cruelly from the self-inflicted blow, but it is hoped that his life will be saved.5
The term ‘Polish painter’ wasn’t overly worrisome – in French the word for Dutch is hollandais and Polish is polonais, and the words sound almost identical when spoken. There was no date, or any indication of which newspaper it was from, but the reference to a self-inflicted wound surely meant that the story could only be about Van Gogh. But the article said it was a follow-up to something that had been published earlier that same week: this was an exciting discovery. I had always thought it was unfathomable that such a juicy story could have been ignored by other newspapers, and these few lines in the newspaper confirmed what I had long suspected: the drama in Arles had made the press elsewhere. In his article, Martin Bailey mentioned that he had tried in vain to find the newspaper source for this cutting. I vowed that when I got back to France I would try to find the original article.6
There were two points in Bailey’s article that also struck me: according to Theo van Gogh, Vincent used a ‘knife’ to mutilate his ear, yet this new source clearly stated ‘a razor’.7 Who was right: Theo or the newspaperman? Secondly, the article described Van Gogh as giving his ear to ‘a girl who worked in a café’, which was contrary to every other account of that night that had been written. The mysterious ‘Rachel’ was always referred to as a prostitute. Was this quaint term of ‘a girl who worked in a café’ a euphemism or was it something else?
* * *
Towards the end of my stay in Holland, a tall, slender Dutchman walked into the library. Fieke introduced him as Dr Louis van Tilborgh, a senior museum researcher. Louis has worked at the Museum for many years and is one of the world authorities on Vincent’s paintings and all things Van Gogh. I had already read so much contradictory material about the ear and here was an expert who might be able to shed some light on my confusion. I asked him his opinion of the discrepancies in the reports about Van Gogh’s ear: some said he cut off the whole thing, others just the lobe. If it were only the lobe, would that really be dramatic enough to make someone faint – as ‘Rachel’ the prostitute apparently had? ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘some people faint at the sight of blood.’
During our meeting, Louis asked me if I had come across Gustave Coquiot’s biography of Van Gogh. Only the name, I responded. He was the first native French speaker to write a biography of the artist. Until my conversation with Louis, I was completely unaware that Coquiot had visited Arles in 1922 and had met people who had known Vincent in the late 1880s. Moreover, he was the first person to have published a contemporary account of Vincent’s injury, which was of great interest to me.
Louis told me that Coquiot’s biography might be helpful, to give me more background information on Arles at the end of the nineteenth century, quite apart from the very useful photographs he took on his visit, when the whole atmosphere and layout of the town wasn’t much changed from 1888. Coquiot’s photographs show the Yellow House as Vincent would have known it. It was strange and wonderful to have his home in front of me now, a ghostly presence from the past. I noticed the slanting façade: Vincent’s famous bedroom was not square, as I had always assumed.8
The Yellow House, 2, place Lamartine, 1922
As the days in Amsterdam rushed by, a seemingly endless stream of boxes was brought to my table. In the beginning I looked carefully at each document, weighing up the need to copy it or not. Everything was interesting. At one point a file was placed on the table called ‘Curiosa’, containing ephemera inspired by the drama in Arles: Van Gogh ears made of rubber, a plethora of cartoons, album covers and even a disappearing-ear coffee mug. I love anything kitsch and spent far too long enjoying these curiosities. Then a new panic set in. I couldn’t see how I would ever be able to get through all the material in this short visit. I began frantically recording anything and everything that seemed vaguely interesting. I started taking hundreds of digital pictures and making endless photocopies from the huge pile of boxes to haul home.
Louis told me that the museum had purchased Coquiot’s notebook in the 1960s. The original was in storage offsite. If I wanted to see the whole book, I would have to return.
* * *
In the spring of 1889 Vincent was at the hospital in Arles on one of the many occasions he stayed there after a breakdown. Far away in Paris, Theo asked the artist Paul Signac, en route south to the Mediterranean coast, if he could stop off in Arles to visit his brother. Coquiot had written to Signac and asked him for his recollections of the trip. Signac’s reply, dated 6 December 1921, is the officially accepted version of Van Gogh’s injury. The original letter is now lost, but was transcribed by Coquiot in his notebook. One particular sentence has been quoted by almost every author of any Van Gogh biography ever since:
I saw him for the last time in the spring of 1889. He was still in the city hospital. A few days earlier he had cut off the lobe (and not the whole ear) in the circumstances you know.9
A drawing done on Vincent’s deathbed in July 1890 by Dr Gachet, who met the artist in the last few weeks of his life, confirmed Signac’s recollections. Naturally, the injury Vincent sustained in Arles two years before had healed by the time the drawing was made. It is only a sketch, and roughly drawn at that, but it appears to show the left side of Van Gogh’s face, including most of the ear. I supposed that the two newspaper accounts had got it wrong, or had exaggerated to make more of a story, and Vincent in fact had cut off a small amount of his ear, or just his lobe.
Van Gogh on his deathbed, 29 July 1890, Dr Paul Gachet
Although I continued researching many different avenues related to Van Gogh’s stay in Arles, the question of the ear continued to plague me. Some while later once I was home Louis got in touch. He had kindly checked exactly what Theo’s widow had said on the subject. She had met Vincent in 1889 after he’d left Arles. He had stayed at her home in Paris and later, in the weeks before his death, she had gone with her husband to Auvers-sur-Oise where Vincent was staying. I assumed she would have seen Vincent’s ear uncovered and known exactly what he had done. She had stated that Vincent had cut off ‘een stuk van het oor’ (‘a piece of the ear’). Her remark really did not help me at all. What did she mean by ‘a piece of the ear’? ‘Piece’ was such an inexact term.
We have Jo to thank for Van Gogh’s legacy of correspondence and artwork: she bequeathed all this to her son – Vincent Willem van Gogh. In 1962 he gave everything on permanent loan to the Dutch state, and this gift forms the core of the Van Gogh Museum’s collection. Yet her remark about the ear seemed vague. With still with no way of ascertaining exactly what Van Gogh had cut off, the entire ear-story was getting more confusing.
* * *
I returned home to Provence with my huge pile of photocopies and images – everything that my magpie eye had spied. That December I started to organise and catalogue the files from my trip. Christmas is a quiet time of year for me in Provence, and it is very different from Christmases I knew as a child. Presents are given only to family members, and there are almost no parties; instead it is a private time, and most people spend the holiday at home with their families. Many homes set up a typical Provençal nativity, with brightly coloured clay figurines called santons, and at midnight on 24 December the family places the figurine of the baby Jesus in the manger: the signal that Christmas has begun. Some villages still have a live nativity during midnight Mass, when a local couple dressed as Mary and Joseph bring in a newborn baby. The real fun begins when the shepherds arrive with sheep and donkeys at the church, making a lively, if unpredictable, tableau.
The French are obsessed by food, and never more so than at Christmas. The main meal is eaten late on Christmas Eve and often lasts several hours. Fish is the principal Christmas dish, followed by thirteen desserts, which sounds more exciting than it really is. The treize desserts include dried fruits, nuts and nougat and bear witness to the humble origins of the tradition, when the fruits preserved during the summer months were saved until Christmas to be eaten as an exceptional treat. Although it’s rather unusual to include a non-family member at the table, I have on many occasions been invited for Christmas dinner with good friends. That Christmas, however, I stayed quietly at home, working through the papers I had copied in Amsterdam. By early January 2010 I had looked through most of the nineteenth-century documents. Then I stumbled upon something exciting.
In some correspondence from the 1950s I found a reference to the writer Irving Stone.10 In 1934, at the height of the Great Depression, Stone had written a fictionalised biography of Vincent called Lust for Life. The story of the painter who had never been recognised in his own lifetime, and who had suffered great hardship for his art, reminded Americans of the difficult times they were living through and brought the artist to the attention of a wider public. It was Stone’s first book and became a huge best-seller, making him a wealthy man. Stone never pretended that Lust for Life was anything other than fiction based on Vincent’s life story. He had borrowed the idea from a German writer who had written a similar fictionalised biography of the artist. Yet Stone’s Van Gogh is the version most people know. After the Second World War the book was made into the film Lust for Life. All the drama, violence and passion of Hollywood was preserved in Technicolor celluloid by Vincente Minnelli and Kirk Douglas.11
I had already written to two libraries in the USA, which I hoped had papers connected to the book and the film. These were unlikely leads, but I felt it was worth looking in unusual places to see if anything turned up. Watching the film as a child was the first time I had ever heard of Van Gogh or seen images of Provence. The brilliant colours and sheer beauty of the landscape inspired me, and I knew that one day I would go there. Many years later I watched a documentary on the ‘making of’ the film on French TV in which Kirk Douglas spoke to one of the extras in perfect French – an elderly lady who had actually known Van Gogh, which made me wonder if she had known Rachel. It was a lead that I needed to follow up. So I hunted down the Vincente Minnelli archive, held at the Oscar Library in Los Angeles.12 The archivist kindly sent me copies of the few documents they held on the film – some production notes and photos taken with extras during the filming. At the same time I had written to the library at the University of California, Berkeley, in San Francisco, which houses Irving Stone’s papers. The archivist, David Kessler, told me that the archive was vast and warned me to expect disappointment:
Much of the correspondence is in French or a language that must be Flemish or Dutch. There is no mention of Arles as a place of research, just a single folder that notes Marseille. The note cards are in no apparent order … There is nothing that I can see that amounts to a transcription or description of original documents. Short of reading all the correspondence, there is no way to definitively know if there is anything about the ‘ear’ episode or the prostitute in this material. My belief is that this material, which is described as very limited, will not shed light on your questions.
That’s the best I can do.
In peace,
David
Until I read the letter I’d copied from the archives in Amsterdam,13 I was unaware that Mr Stone had actually made a trip to Arles. Moreover, he had visited Dr Félix Rey, a very important figure in the story of Vincent in Arles. Rey had just started working as an intern at the local hospital when Van Gogh was admitted with a wound to his ear. Rey was one of the people who kept Theo van Gogh informed of his brother’s progress while Vincent was hospitalised; and, as time passed, Rey became Vincent’s friend. The artist honoured this friendship by painting a beautiful portrait of the young doctor.
As Rey continued to work at the public hospital in Arles until his death in 1932, any visitor keen to investigate the life of Vincent van Gogh in Arles would have found the doctor the easiest of Vincent’s acquaintances to locate. Despite the librarian’s assurance that there was nothing more to find in the Stone archive, the mention of a trip Stone had made to Arles gave me a small glimmer of hope. One cold January afternoon I opened my computer and excitedly started writing an email. I did not realise then how significant that moment would come to be.