Why Did Van Gogh Cut Off His Ear?

What happened in Arles on 23 December 1888?

The painter Paul Gauguin had come to stay with Vincent van Gogh in Arles, in the south of France, where Van Gogh dreamed of a "studio of the south" for like-minded artists.^[5] The two worked happily at first, but their discussions about art grew more frequent and sometimes heated: Van Gogh believed in painting from reality, Gauguin from memory and imagination.^[1] Van Gogh feared that Gauguin would leave and that his dream of an artists' community would fall apart.^[7]

On the evening of 23 December 1888, Van Gogh suffered an acute mental breakdown and cut off his left ear.^[2] The Van Gogh Museum says he did it in utter confusion after a heated argument.^[1] He wrapped the ear in paper and took it to a brothel, where, according to the local weekly Le Forum Républicain, he asked for a woman called Rachel, handed it to her and said: "Keep this object carefully."^[1][2] She fainted, and the police, who found him at home the next morning, took him to hospital.^[1][2]

Did Van Gogh cut off his whole ear?

Those directly involved in Arles (Gauguin, the hospital doctor Félix Rey and the policeman Alphonse Robert) said he had cut off the entire ear, as the local paper reported.^[2] But Jo van Gogh-Bonger, who married his brother Theo in 1889, Paul Gachet Jr and the painter Paul Signac later said it was only the lower part.^[1][2] Signac, who visited him in hospital, wrote that he had cut off "the lobe" and "not the whole ear", and historians long accepted that view.^[3]

For the Van Gogh Museum, the question was answered by a letter Dr Rey wrote on 18 August 1930 to the author Irving Stone, who was working on a novel about Van Gogh.^[1] It contains two simple sketches of the wound, with Rey's note: "The ear was cut off with a razor along the dotted line."^[1][4] The letter lay among Stone's papers at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley, where archivist David Kessler found it in 2010 while helping the art historian Bernadette Murphy.^[3] It was shown in the Van Gogh Museum's 2016 exhibition On the Verge of Insanity, the year Murphy published her book Van Gogh's Ear.^[3][4]

Based on the drawings, the Van Gogh Museum says it is now certain that he cut off his entire ear.^[1] Other descriptions differ slightly: the Associated Press reported that only a small flap of the lobe was left, and the Courtauld says he cut off "most of" his left ear.^[4][5]

Murphy's research also questioned who received the ear: the museum and the letters edition call her a prostitute, but Murphy concluded that she was an 18-year-old named Gabrielle who worked as a maid at the brothel.^[1][2][3]

Why did he do it?

Nobody knows for certain: Van Gogh said nothing in his letters about the immediate cause, and when Dr Rey asked about his motive, he replied that it was "a purely personal matter".^[2] In May 1889 an asylum doctor noted that he had only a vague memory of the attack.^[2]

Gauguin's accounts of the evening differ: soon after reaching Paris he told the artist Bernard that Van Gogh had run after him that night.^[1][2] In his book Avant et après, written in 1903, he added that Van Gogh had rushed at him with an open razor before turning back.^[1][2] The editors of Van Gogh's letters note that Gauguin's reliability is often doubted and that Bernard's summary mentions no attack, though they think Gauguin's account was probably based on the truth.^[2]

In Arles, Rey called the crisis "a transient over-excitement" and blamed a lifestyle with much alcohol, coffee and tobacco and poor food, while his superior, Jules Urpar, noted "an attack of acute mania with generalized delirium".^[6]

What illness did Van Gogh have?

His doctors diagnosed his repeated attacks as a form of epilepsy.^[1] The Van Gogh Museum says the cause of the attacks can no longer be determined, although it is plausible that several episodes would now be classed as psychosis: he had auditory and possibly visual hallucinations, intense nightmares and delusions.^[1]

A 2020 study in the International Journal of Bipolar Disorders, based on diagnostic interviews with three art historians who know his letters well, offers one interpretation.^[6] It concluded that he most likely had several illnesses: likely a mood disorder, probably bipolar, with a borderline personality disorder or traits of one, worsened by an alcohol use disorder and malnutrition, which with rising tensions led to the crisis in which he cut off his ear.^[6] The authors add that focal epilepsy cannot be ruled out and that medical ethics are cautious about diagnosing someone never examined in person.^[6]

The self-portraits with a bandaged ear

Van Gogh left hospital on 7 January 1889, and about a week later he painted Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, now at the Courtauld in London.^[2][5] The bandage is on his right side because he painted his reflection in a mirror.^[5] He had recently bought the fur cap to hold the thick bandage in place and keep out the cold.^[5] He painted a second self-portrait with the bandage, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe, now in a private collection.^[1]

What happened to Van Gogh afterwards?

He wrote to Theo that he had not known "that one could break one's brain and that afterwards that got better too".^[1] But more crises and hospital stays followed, and neighbours started a petition to have him locked up in a psychiatric hospital.^[1] Murphy found that only 30 people signed it and that 24 of them did not live in Arles.^[3]

On 8 May 1889 he voluntarily entered the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy, staying a year and painting whenever he felt well enough.^[1] In May 1890 he moved to Auvers, closer to Theo in Paris.^[1] He died there by suicide on 29 July 1890, at the age of 37.^[4][6]