Vincent van Gogh cut off almost all of his left ear on the night of December 23, 1888, during a mental breakdown. He never explained why, and the doctors who treated him described what happened as an attack.
Two pressures made that night the breaking point. Paul Gauguin, the painter who shared his house in Arles, in the south of France, was about to leave him. And news that his brother Theo, who paid his bills, was engaged to be married probably reached Vincent that same day.
The two painters had lived since late October in the Yellow House, a house with yellow walls on the Place Lamartine in Arles, which Vincent rented and painted in a picture of its own. That evening they quarreled, and Gauguin walked out and took a room in a hotel in town.
Alone in the house, Vincent cut off his ear. He carried it through the dark streets to a brothel nearby, where he handed it to a young woman. She fainted, and the police were called.
The next morning the police found Vincent in his bed, badly wounded, and he was taken to the hospital in Arles, where a young doctor named Félix Rey treated him. Gauguin left for Paris on the evening of December 25 and never saw Vincent again.
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The most famous detail of that night, Vincent coming at Gauguin with a razor, comes from Gauguin himself. It took place in the street, before Gauguin went to the hotel, and by his own account he was not in the house later, when the ear was cut. No other witness is known.
The best-known scene in Van Gogh's life therefore rests on a single memory, and Gauguin wrote his fullest version of it many years later. None of this proves that he lied. It only means that nobody can check him.
Gauguin's version of the evening
The first written account of the night reached Paris within days. On January 1, 1889, the painter Émile Bernard, a friend of both men, sent it to Albert Aurier, a young critic who a year later wrote the first long article about Vincent's work. What Bernard told him came from Gauguin, who had just arrived back in Paris.
What You'll Discover
Who else was blamed for the cut.
Who really got the ear.
How much ear was left.
What may have set it off.