Van Gogh Cut Off a Lot More Than His Earlobe

Aside from his beautiful paintings, one of the longest-lasting elements of Vincent van Gogh’s legacy is the story of his left ear. Memorialized in a self-portrait that depicts him with a bandage wrapped around his head, the question of just how much of his ear remained has persisted. While many scholars thought that van Gogh chopped off just a small part of his lobe, a recently uncovered letter suggests that the wound may have been much more extensive, James Adams reports for The Globe and Mail. For years, the consensus among scholars was that on the night of December 23, 1888, van Gogh sliced off his left earlobe using a straight razor, which he then washed and gave to a local prostitute in the French town of Arles. Despite the inherent dramatics of the story, historians have resisted the popular characterization that van Gogh cut off his entire ear. However, amateur historian Bernadette Murphy recently discovered a drawing from the doctor who treated the artist that shows he took much more than scholars once thought, Sarah Laskow writes for Atlas Obscura. Murphy uncovered the drawing scrawled on a letter in the Irving Stone Archives at the University of California Berkeley. Stone, an American writer who was partly responsible for reinvigorating public interest in van Gogh’s story, had visited Arles in 1930 while researching his biographical novel, Lust for Life. During this visit, Stone met with van Gogh’s doctor, Félix Rey, and asked him to sketch an illustration of what the artist’s ear looked like. Rey tore off a piece of paper from a prescription pad and sketched out the trajectory of van Gogh’s slice, which removed everything save for a nub of the earlobe. “I am happy to give you the information you have requested concerning my unfortunate friend,” Rey wrote in French beneath his sketch. “I sincerely hope that you won’t fail to glorify the genius of this remarkable painter, as he deserves.” The grisly details debunk the usual story, which centers on the painter Paul Gauguin’s decision to leave Arles, leading his distraught friend van Gogh to cut off a chunk of his ear in a fit of madness. But instead, Rey’s sketch suggests that van Gogh’s self-inflicted maiming was more extreme, Jonathan Jones writes for The Guardian.