The story of the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh is perhaps one of the most gripping and surprising in the art world. This great artist went down in history for very famous works such as Los Girasoles , but also for leading a quite tormented life that even led him to commit self-mutilation. Let us now learn more about the true history of Van Gogh’s ear and other curiosities of the painter .
The true story of Van Gogh’s ear and other curiosities of the painter
It was the night of December 23, 1888, in Arles, that Vincent Van Gogh cut off his ear with a razor, wrapped it in a sheet of newspaper, and gave it to a woman, who was said to be a prostitute. Was it a gesture of anger, of despair (for what?), The result of a fight with his painter friend Paul Gauguin ? Over the years, the theories have been the most disparate.
However, the mutilation was always thought to be small and only affected a small part of the left lobe. But a document that was found in 2016, revealed that it was actually a much more serious injury: the painter had cut almost the entire left pavilion. A violent act of self-harm that preceded suicide, which occurred two years later.
The sketch that explains how Van Gogh injured himself
The document itself is a sketch drawn in 1930 by Felix Rey, the doctor who treated Van Gogh’s wound at the Arles hospital. A drawing that was found among the papers in the archives of the writer Irving Stone , who wrote the famous Van Gogh biography “Lust to Live.”
To learn about the painter’s life, Stone went to Arles in 1930, and also visited the attending physician, asking him to explain how Van Gogh had cut off his ear.
In the sketch, dated August 18, 1930, it is clearly seen that the cut corresponds to a large part of the pavilion. The drawing was exhibited in the exhibition at the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, On The Verge of Insanity, dedicated to the artist’s madness.
The mysterious woman
The sketch revealed the severity of Van Gogh’s injury, but it was also recently known who was the woman to whom the painter gave his ear.
It was a Van Gogh enthusiast, Bernadette Murphy, who dedicated a book to the history of the painter’s ear and was able to find out who the “mysterious woman” was. In his book he explains that the woman Van Gogh supposedly brought his ear to in the middle of the night was not a prostitute named Rachel, as has always been said, but a 19-year-old maid named Gabrielle.
Why was your ear cut off?
As for the real reason why Van Gogh decided to cut off his left ear, it was always said that it was an outburst after an argument with his friend, the also painter Gaugin, but several historians have the version that at the time it occurred During the incident, Van Gogh was experiencing an existential crisis and it also seems that he was under the influence of absinthe that he had drunk excessively . All this triggered him to end up taking a razor blade with which he injured himself.
Other curiosities of Van Gogh
Along with the story about Van Gogh’s ear, there are many other curiosities that we can reveal about the famous painter of whom everyone already knows that despite his celebrity today, he died in poverty.
The brilliant artist ended up taking his life on July 29, 1890 in a house in Provence, in Auvers-sur-Oise, where he had moved for some time and after apparently shooting himself in the stomach.
A life full of art but also pain and suffering, although Van Gogh had always tried to seek happiness. The painter always lived with the memory of a brother who died at birth with whom he shared the name. He grew up seeing that name, his, in a grave and always trying to fill in the darkness that it created for him. For all this, it is believed that chrome yellow is the color that gave him joy and kept him from all his bad thoughts, hence it was the color he used the most for painting. A color that for him was a means to get out of the shadows, a symbol of joy. It became almost an obsession, so much so that it is said that Van Gogh ingested the color of the tube in an attempt to absorb as much of its effects as possible and acquire that happiness that so attracted his eyes. Obviously, at the time, the colors were made with mineral materials, saffron and egg white. Also, yellow was the least expensive of the colors, a not inconsiderable detail for Vincent, who suffered financial hardships all his life.
