What exactly lay under the bandage? Van Gogh's Ear by Bernadette Murphy
On the evening of 23 December 1888 Vincent van Gogh suffered a mental breakdown, and he cut part of his left ear. He then bandaged the wound and took his ear to a girl, known as Rachel. The following day he was admitted to hospital.
Van Gogh’s ear has been an object of fascination for years. What happened on that December night in 1888 when Vincent van Gogh took a blade and cut his own ear. Did he sever the whole ear of just cut off the lobe? Who is the mysterious “Rachel”, the girl that Van Gogh handed his severed ear to? Over the years, art historians come up with all sorts of different theories, but it was Bernadette Murphy and her quest to discover what exactly has happened that night that unearthed new research and finally solve the mystery of Van Gogh's ear.
Bernadette Murphy, an educator with a degree in art history, was born in the UK but has lived in most of her adult life in Provence, just a few miles away from the town Arles, where Van Gogh famously cut his ear. The thought of investigating Van Gogh and understanding what happened that day in December 1888 came to her while she was off work recuperating from a health problem. It started with a simple question: "What exactly lay under the bandage?" Before long, she had set out a timeline of Van Gogh’s life in Arles. But the more deeply she delved into his life, the more she questioned.
It was some inconsequential details that led her into looking at the whole story again. It was going to be an adventure that began at the scene of the crime in the south of France to Paris, to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and to the hidden evidence in a library in California.
The story is well known from the BBC2 documentary The Mystery of Van Gogh’s Ear with Jeremy Paxman. I haven’t seen it -my antipathy towards television has grown louder over the years- therefore, I have no opinion to offer. But Bernadette Murphy's story, Van Gogh's Ear: The True Story, is fascinating. It has taken years of painstaking research, but the result is a methodical and brilliant forensic examination of that December day in 1888. An absorbing exploration of this period in the life of a troubled, sensitive and world-class artist.