Author pierces van Gogh ear mystery
Bernadette Murphy spent six years trying to answer one art’s most pressing questions
When she first saw the drawing of Vincent van Gogh’s ear in her email inbox, Bernadette Murphy, who left her job to solve one of the art world’s most enduring mysteries, began to shake.
For more than a century, there had been confusion about what happened to the artist’s ear the night of Dec. 23, 1888. Had he removed his entire ear or a part of his ear, and had he done it to himself?
Here was a before-and-after drawing from his attending doctor, Felix Rey, never before seen, showing that the artist cut off his entire ear — save for a small piece — with a razor. The author of Van Gogh’s Ear: The True Story, had to keep it secret as she corroborated, confirmed and found out more.
“All my friends thought I was completely crazy, and didn’t believe it would ever come to pass,” the firsttime author says in Amsterdam, sighing with relief as her six-year secret was announced to the world on Tuesday. “It’s a nightmare for a book company. The PR people can’t send out preview books.”
Seven years ago, Murphy, who was raised in the United Kingdom, but worked in the education field in France, was restless at work. Around the same time, her sister died, and she had her own health problems and was at home with some time on her hands. She liked puzzles and had a knack for research — but instead of reaching for the crossword, she gradually became intrigued by an old art mystery and wondered if she could determine what happened to van Gogh. She was in her early 50s, and left her job behind, taking a cut to her pension to take on the case full-time.
“All of the keepers of the van Gogh flames had some sort of investment in his legacy, and their accounts are never entirely dispassionate,” Murphy writes in the book.
In the fall of 1888, van Gogh was living in his yellow house in Arles, France, eagerly awaiting the arrival of painter Paul Gauguin. He dreamed of an artist colony, and prepared Gauguin’s studio with great care, hoping he would feel at home, “Because I’m so strongly inclined to believe that all this will last for a long time,” he wrote in a hopeful letter to Gauguin.
Famously, it did not work out, and ended with one of the most wellknown moments in art history.
In 2009, two German academics wondered if Gauguin, an avid fencer, had sliced off van Gogh’s ear and the two artists entered a pact of silence.
Murphy dismisses that theory, saying there is no indication of the type of sword, “a foil, sabre or épée, only two of which would be able to slice through flesh,” and with no other injuries, it would have been an attack with “Zorro-like precision.”
Her bit of “research gold” — as one van Gogh specialist called it — came from a drawing in the collection of novelist Irving Stone. Stone was researching van Gogh for his fictionalized biography, Lust for Life, and met with Dr. Rey in 1930, asking him to draw the injury. Murphy found out about the possible existence of the drawing at the Bancroft Library at the University of California and sent an email. “Do you have ANYTHING that looks like this?” she wrote. “I am desperate to get a hold of it.”
The archivist, David Kessler, had already been through the boxes of Stone’s research material with no luck, but had another look through the personal papers at Murphy’s insistence. When he found it, he sent a smiley-faced bit of punctuation to Murphy.
Dated Aug. 18, 1930, the paper has two diagrams. One shows the ear before the injury, with a dotted line indicating where the ear had been cut and a note, in French, that read: “The ear was sliced with a razor following the dotted line.” There was another drawing of the ear after the incident, showing only a small piece of the lobe remaining.
At the bottom was a signed note from Rey:
“I’m happy to be able to give you the information you have requested concerning my unfortunate friend Van Gogh. I sincerely hope that you won’t fail to glorify the genius of this remarkable painter, as he deserves.”
“It’s really quite jarring, after 129 years, to see something new come along,” says David Brooks, a Torontobased van Gogh specialist who has run an online catalogue of the artist’s complete works for 20 years. “It’s not Bernadette having an opinion or some theories, it’s really concrete stuff she’s uncovered.”
During her research, Murphy got in touch with many people, including Brooks.
She did not tell him what she had found, and he was pleasantly surprised at the news on Tuesday.
Brooks says he was going back and forth, because the doctor’s illustration was made 40 years after the incident — but “an entirely severed ear is not something you forget that easily.”
“The really great thing about what she has done is that she has traced back this information to somebody who was standing next to Vincent van Gogh,” Brooks says.
Another revelation in Murphy’s book casts doubt on the profession of one of the key players. A well-worn part of the story notes that van Gogh gave his severed ear to a prostitute named Rachel. Murphy made an extensive database of the people who lived in Arles at the time, and crossreferenced archival records with local accounts. She eventually discovered that “Rachel,” who also went by the name “Gaby,” was not a prostitute, but a young woman who cleaned the brothel at night and businesses during the day.
She tracked down descendants, and delicately broached the subject, learning bits and pieces about the woman’s life in the process: she had been attacked by a dog in early 1888. In the lead-up to the incident, van Gogh, who died in1890, was obsessed with religion. Gauguin had noted that his “dear friend had come to believe himself a Christ.”
“It may seem a stretch, but I would suggest that in Van Gogh’s heightened state he gave the girl a part of his own healthy body to replace her damaged flesh,” Murphy posits in the book.
The woman’s family did not want her surname released, because “it’s very hard to change a mistruth.”
“Somebody else will walk into the archives and find her surname, but it will not be me unravelling it,” she says. “It’s silly. In a way, does it matter? She was a young girl caught up in a thing beyond their control — she didn’t ask for this to happen to her, and was absolutely traumatized by this.”
Murphy, who made the announcement at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, says her book informs a new exhibit opening this week and the official version of events will reflect what she has uncovered, including the loss of the entire ear.
“I hope it’s an inspirational story,” she says of her quest. “Your life is not over, you can try something new.”
“All my friends thought I was completely crazy, and didn’t believe it would ever come to pass.”
BERNADETTE MURPHY
AUTHOR OF VAN GOGH’S EAR: THE TRUE STORY (LEFT)