On the night of December 23, 1888, in Arles, France, Vincent van Gogh cut off the lower part of his left ear with a razor. He was 35 years old, and he was in the middle of a severe psychological crisis.
The short answer: Van Gogh cut off his ear during a mental breakdown, hours after a heated argument with Paul Gauguin, the painter he had been living with for nine weeks. He later said he had no memory of the act itself.
Everything around that answer is a stranger story than most people know.
Nine weeks with Gauguin
In October 1888, Gauguin moved into the Yellow House in Arles at Van Gogh's invitation. Van Gogh hoped the two of them would found an artists' studio together, the seed of a community of painters in the south.
It went badly almost from the start. The two men had different temperaments and different ideas about painting, and nine weeks under one roof turned those differences into constant friction.
On the night of December 23, after a heated argument, the arrangement collapsed. Sometime that night, Van Gogh took a razor to his own left ear.
The walk to the brothel
What Van Gogh did next is the part no invention could improve. He wrapped the severed piece of his ear in paper, walked to a local brothel, and handed the package to a young woman who worked there, asking her to keep it carefully.
For over a century, that woman was known only as Rachel, assumed to be a prostitute. Research published in 2016 by the biographer Bernadette Murphy identified her real name: Gabrielle Berlatier, 18 years old.
She worked at the brothel as a cleaner. She had taken the job to pay off medical debt after being attacked by a rabid dog. When she opened the package, she fainted.
The morning after
Police found Van Gogh unconscious at the Yellow House the next morning. He was taken to the Hotel Dieu hospital in Arles, where his case landed on a 21 year old medical intern named Felix Rey.
Van Gogh survived. He later said he remembered nothing of the event itself.
Gauguin left Arles for Paris shortly afterward. The two painters never met again in person, though they went on writing to each other.
The sword theory, and why experts reject it
In 2009, a book called "Pact of Silence" by Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegans proposed a different version: that Gauguin, a trained fencer, injured Van Gogh's ear with a sword during the argument, and that the two men agreed never to speak of it.
It made headlines. It did not convince the specialists. Louis van Tilborgh, curator at the Van Gogh Museum, stated that the authors provide no consistent evidence for the theory.
It remains a minority position. The accepted account is still that Van Gogh injured himself.
How much ear did he actually cut off?
For most of the twentieth century, the standard version said Van Gogh removed only the earlobe, a small piece.
That changed in 2016. A diagram drawn at the time by Dr Rey himself was rediscovered and matched against Van Gogh's later self portraits.
The forensic reassessment concluded that Van Gogh had cut off nearly the entire ear. A century of retellings had shrunk the wound.
FAQ
Why did Van Gogh cut off his ear? He did it during a severe psychological crisis on the night of December 23, 1888, hours after a heated argument with Paul Gauguin. He later said he had no memory of the act itself.
Which ear did Van Gogh cut off? His left ear. His self portraits show the bandage on the right side because he painted himself in a mirror.
Did Van Gogh cut off his whole ear or just the lobe? A 2016 forensic reassessment, based on a diagram drawn by his doctor Felix Rey, concluded he cut off nearly the entire ear, far more than the small piece long assumed.
Who did Van Gogh give his ear to? A young woman at a local brothel in Arles. Long assumed to be a prostitute named Rachel, she was identified in 2016 as Gabrielle Berlatier, an 18 year old cleaner paying off medical debt after a rabid dog attack. She fainted.
Did Gauguin cut off Van Gogh's ear? A 2009 book argued that Gauguin, a trained fencer, wounded Van Gogh with a sword and that both men kept it secret. The Van Gogh Museum says the authors provide no consistent evidence, and the theory remains a minority position.
One document settled the oldest question about the wound. In 2016, a diagram sketched by Dr Felix Rey, the 21 year old intern who treated Van Gogh, was rediscovered and matched to the painter's later self portraits. It showed that Van Gogh had cut off nearly his entire ear, correcting the small lobe version repeated for a century.