On the night of 23 December 1888, in the southern French town of Arles, Vincent van Gogh cut off most of his left ear with a razor and took it to a brothel. He had been sharing the Yellow House with the painter Paul Gauguin since the autumn, and Gauguin was about to leave. When he was asked why, Vincent answered that it was a purely personal matter.
The police found Vincent in the house the next morning, 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 25 December and never saw him again.
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Almost everything people say about that night traces back to Gauguin. He is the source of the scene every retelling repeats, Vincent coming at him with a razor. But by his own account, Gauguin was not in the house when the ear was cut, and no other witness is known.
So the cut itself has no witness at all. What exists is Gauguin's account of the evening that led up to it, and the fullest version of that account was written more than a decade later. One of the first versions was passed on by a friend, in a letter. That does not make Gauguin a liar. It does mean the best-known scene in Van Gogh's life rests on a single memory.
What You'll Discover
What Gauguin said in the first days.
Who else was blamed for the cut.
Who really got the ear.
How much ear was left.
What Vincent said about it afterward.