Van Gogh’s Ear and Finding Rachel

In 1888, in Provence, in the city of Arles, an event occurred that would enter modern legend. In the red-light district on the northern edge of town, a foreigner arrived at a brothel's door. He handed a package to one of the girls. Inside was a piece of his own flesh, bloodstained. The man's name was Vincent van Gogh. At the time, he was an unknown and unsuccessful painter, but today he's among the most celebrated artists of all time.

That year, in all, has come to define him, the year he created his most treasured masterpieces, but also the time when he took a knife to his own ear. Vincent van Gogh was found in his bed at 7 in the morning on Christmas Eve 1888. He was curled up in a foetal position, his head covered in blood-soaked rags. The policeman who found him thought he was dead. It's the most famous incident in the history of Modern Art, but no one can agree on what actually happened. One cannot even be sure that he cut off his own ear.

Bernadette Murphy, a dedicated art lover living in Provence, has been on a 7-year mission to uncover the forgotten truth behind the legend. Hunting for every scrap of evidence, she eventually embarks on an international journey to solve the most perplexing art mystery of our time.

The ancient town of Arles sits on the northern edge of the Camargue, a Roman city just 20 miles from the Mediterranean coast. Vincent van Gogh arrived here in 1888, aged 35, an unsuccessful artist, seeking to escape the smog of Paris for a brighter, as he thought, purer world.

In April, he went south to a bullfight. Culturally, this town sits between France and Spain, famous as a romantic place of cowboys and gypsies, with its own language, culture, and colourful costumes. When Van Gogh painted the scene, he focused on the exotic women in the stands, not the gory action in the arena. The crowd was magnificent, he wrote to a friend. The local women and girls wore simple, cheap material in green, red, pink, or Havana yellow, and above it all a sulphurous sun in a vibrant blue sky. It's hard at first not to be swept away by the spectacle, but it's not a fair fight and has an inevitable end. For local people, the bloody end of these poor animals is the explanation for Vincent's own bloody episode in Arles. There's a local story that says Van Gogh's cutting off his ear and sending it to his girlfriend is explained by bullfighting, because at the end of a successful contest the bull's ear is cut off and sent to a lucky recipient in the audience. Unfortunately, the facts get in the way of this local legend. When Vincent was here, they did not cut off the ears. That's a tradition they've imported from Spain. What happens here is, for the most part, impenetrable to Outsiders, but the local story can't always be trusted. It's for that reason that Vincent's time here is so misunderstood.

It would take a foreigner with local knowledge to unravel the mystery. Bernadette Murphy was once an art history student in London, but she moved to Provence in 1983. After years of living and working in the region, she knows the place and its people as well as any outsider can. Bernadette became fascinated by the stories told about Provence's most famous artist, Vincent van Gogh. She was astonished to discover how little was known for sure about his life and about the night he was said to have cut off his ear. She wondered why there was so much ambiguity about the whole story. Since 2010, Bernadette has haunted the town, record offices, libraries, and archives. Her great advantage was her local knowledge and connections, and she knew her way around French bureaucracy. Her first instinct was to understand the scene of the crime, the place where Vincent supposedly cut off his ear, and, incidentally, the most famous artist's studio of all time.

The Yellow House was both the inspiration for some of Van Gogh's most memorable paintings and the studio where many of his masterpieces were created. It stood on the northern edge of the city, at Place Lamartine, until 1944, when it was bombed during the war.

Yellow House – Van Gogh.

How did Vincent van Gogh end up living here? He arrived in Arles, walked through the gates into the city, and took a room in a hotel. Meanwhile, he was painting in the fields beyond the station, and on the way he had to pass a cafe. The lady who ran it had been raised in the Yellow House, and her parents had both died there, so the house had not been lived in for about 18 months when Vincent took it over. Vincent's painting gives a vivid sense of Place Lamartine as he knew it. In the background is the Railway Bridge leading to the station, and in the foreground are Road Works where the gas was being installed, and in the streets his neighbours mill about on their way to and from the green gate. It's an image bursting with optimism, and yet it was behind those pretty green windows that he supposedly cut his own ear.

How did Van Gogh's life in Arles go so very badly wrong? The mystery hinges on events two nights before Christmas 1888. The bare facts were reported in the local press. Accounts at 11:30 a.m. say a man named M Vel appeared at the door of a brothel on Rue du Bout d'Arles. He asked for a girl named Rachel. When she arrived, he handed her his own severed ear.

But can the reports really be trusted? More than one account lists his nationality as Polish rather than Dutch. Three versions say the ear was in a package. Another says he was holding it in place on his head. Most say this girl Rachel was a prostitute, but one says she was just a girl who worked at a cafe. With so many inconsistencies, Bernadette was determined to find out what, if anything, was true, including whether he cut off his ear. It's the one thing everyone knows about Vincent, but is it really just tabloid sensationalism? The world's foremost experts aren't convinced that's what actually happened.

Bernadette has been given access to the Museum's own research centre. She has asked to see the evidence which seems to cast doubt on the story that he cut off his ear. This notebook of an early biographer contains a letter from the painter Paul Signac, who visited Vincent shortly after his injury. It says, "I saw him the last time in Arles in the spring of 1889. He was already at the hospital of the town, but the day of my visit he was perfectly okay, and he had the famous band around his head and a fur hat. A few days earlier he had cut off the lobe of the ear, not the ear." This seems to be supported by a drawing made of Vincent on his deathbed, a year and a half later, by his doctor. There's Vincent lying with his eyes shut, and the top part of the ear perfectly intact. So, this confirms what Paul Signac said in 1921, an eyewitness statement.

The newspapers all say he cut off his ear, but these eyewitnesses are clear it was only the lobe. Experts have long been perplexed by this discrepancy. Who to believe? That's always been the question. But in general, for us, the more reliable accounts come from people who were close to him, who saw him, knew him a couple of times, and said it was half the year. So that has always been our point of view. Was the ear incident a major crisis, or was it just a minor event that's been sexed up over time? Unlike the vast majority of other artists, Vincent's life is as famous as his work. It's one of the reasons this Museum in particular is so well attended. Of course, van Gogh isn't the only artist who could pack out a gallery day after day, but what is unusual about him is the extent to which his personal story is tied up in our appreciation of his paintings. People don't just come to see the sunflowers. They want to see the self-portraits, the staring eyes of a man dead at 37 whose vision was simply too intense for the world. For once, the word icon is the right one. These images stand for the modern belief that genius and self-destruction go hand in hand. So, if he didn't cut his ear off, is that whole story built on a lie?

The man who arrived in Arles was 35 years old and had plenty in his background to suggest a tortured soul. Born in 1853, the son of a Dutch Protestant minister, he was long suspected by those close to him of being mentally ill. He was unable to sustain careers as an art dealer, a pastor, or a teaching assistant. Instead of respectable relationships, he was drawn to peasants and poor street women, the only people who would put up with his weird, fanatical personality. He was alternately unbearably depressive or unbearably manic, and he attached himself to people. If he found a friend, he wouldn't let that person go, but he was also terribly argumentative, so that left him with almost no friendships and a family that would despair over him. And there were times in his life when he was so lonely that the only person he spoke to during the day was the waitress at the cafe from whom he ordered his lunch. So, one can imagine the sheer agony of being Vincent van Gogh.

Red Vine Yard – Van Gogh

The one person who stuck by him throughout was his younger brother, Theo. Theo was a successful art dealer, and it was he who took on the burden of setting Vincent back on his feet by offering to fund a new career for him as a painter. But he was unable to sell any of Vincent's early work. In February 1888, Vincent was a failed painter, totally dependent on his brother, and suspected by many of being mentally ill. That seems easily enough to explain a nervous breakdown, but actually, in the year it happened, things were all going pretty well. On February the 20th, he moved down to Arles, and there he set out on daily tours into the countryside in search of inspiration for a new kind of art. When we think of the heat and the fact that he was carrying an easel and canvases, these walks must have been real marathons. What seduced him was the colours he had completely abandoned, the dreary old Greys and Browns of Northern Europe, and here in southern France he seemed to have discovered an entirely new world. The landscape around Arles is quintessential Provence, but in Vincent's mind it was dazzlingly alien. Whether it was the rich colours that surrounded him or simply the fact that he was away from critical eyes, on these lonely country walks he finally found his painting style. When he got where he wanted to be, he attacked the canvas. “I follow no recognised system of brushwork”, he said. “I hit with irregular.” “I'm tempted to think that the results will be so worrying and annoying as not to please people with preconceived ideas about technique.” He was right. No one understood it at the time, but now we see his works as his masterpieces. He wrote to Theo that he'd found the future of Modern Art, and he dreamed that a whole movement of artists would soon join him on a shared mission, painting in the South. But what was it that changed Vincent from this optimistic dreamer into a mental patient capable of self-harm?

Bernadette is convinced the answers have to lie in the town of Arles itself. The last place Vincent was seen the night he cut his ear was at the Rue du Bout d'Arles, only 100 yards from the Yellow House. He was seen there, at a brothel, at about 11:30 p.m., in the heart of the red-light district in Arles in 1888. The convent was on the opposite side, and they complained incessantly about the noise, but of course the town father ignored them quite happily. This was a pretty lively place. The whole street would have been full of comings and goings, with quite a lot of noise. People were complaining that the girls were making lewd remarks, and there was screaming and yelling and all sorts of things going on.

He and his brother discuss it openly in their letters. It was part and parcel of life for a 19th-century man. Vincent equates it with having bread and food. Vincent frequented many of these brothels and painted one, giving us a sense of the atmosphere.

But on the night of December 23rd, he sought out one in particular. He crossed the square. It's been identified at the end of the street, and he came directly to this house, which was the House of Tolerance number one. He knocked on the door around 11:30; he turned up here, but he didn't go into the brothel. He asked for a girl called Rachel, that's what the local newspaper reports, and presumably she came out into the street. He handed her a parcel and said something that seemed almost biblical. He said, take care of this, look after this carefully, do this, keep a souvenir of me, remember a memory of me, do this in remembrance of me. It wasn't something done arbitrarily. It was done as a gift for her. What was going on here? Was Vincent, in his madness, trying to seduce this poor girl? Was he trying to scare her? Most intriguingly, he knew her. He asked for her by name.

Yellow Flowers – Van Gogh

Bernadette decides to find out who she was, maybe work out what he was doing, and thereby understand the act. For Bernadette, this kicks off the search for Rachel, a search in its way as intriguing as the question about his ear. Bernadette knows that the prostitutes were all based in a particular part of town. In 19th-century France, brothels were regulated by the state. They were called houses of Tolerance. The prostitutes and the madams were recorded in the town census with delicate euphemisms for their jobs. Bernadette can't find Rachel, the one girl she's looking for. Bernadette spends months trying to get to the bottom of this question: why were there no Rachels in the town census?

Then a clue emerged that completely changed everything. She revisited an old press article quoting the policeman who attended the scene of the crime. In it, he says the prostitute's name is Gabby. Bernadette realised that Rachel is a highly unusual name in Arles. She went back to the records and found that many of the names were followed by the words Delle called Rachel. It's just the nickname, but Rachel is one of the names that occurs linked to different girls. There were no Rachels living in Arles in 1888, but there were 31 women called Gabrielle or Gabby. One of those women must have been the girl Vincent gave his ear to.

Another crucial character in this story, far easier to track down in the weeks before he cut his ear, was Paul Gauguin. Van Gogh had been living with another great post-impressionist, the notorious Paul Gauguin. Gauguin is a very complicated and interesting painter, and a very great one, but he was something of a jerk. He had a very high opinion of himself, but he must also have been terribly charismatic. One of his admirers was Vincent van Gogh. Gauguin was the man he went to first when Vincent hit upon a plan to reinvent the Yellow House as an artist's studio or Brotherhood. They would live there in a sort of commune, or a medieval guild, or, as he put it, like a band of Japanese Buddhist monks. His art dealer brother, Theo, would feed them, clothe them, and give them canvases and paint, and the artists would just create. Vincent spent weeks writing to Gauguin, persuading him to join him in his utopian idea.

Self Portrait- Gauguin

The sunflowers were painted to decorate Gauguin's bedroom. He bought 12 wicker chairs for the brother artists and one ornate chair for Gauguin, whose age and success meant he would be the Father Superior in their Community. But the reality couldn't have been more different from Vincent's monastic ideal. He arrived in Arles with a pretty strong ego, and he found himself in this house with this very difficult person, almost without self-esteem, who didn't believe he could possibly find a woman to sleep with without paying her. It was a terrible situation. He was only there because Theo was paying him to be there. Within days of his arrival, he was sending his friends in Paris letters saying he had to get out of here and couldn't possibly take this any longer. Van Gogh’s dream of Brotherhood was doomed from the start. Not only did he and Gauguin have different personalities, but they also disagreed about art. Gauguin liked to paint from his imagination and found it laughable that Vincent painted from life. He produced what seemed a mocking portrait of Vincent painting the sunflowers. Vincent looked at it and said, “That's me all right”.

Van Gogh painting Sunflowers - Gauguin

After he had shown Van Gogh the painting, the two went to a bar, where Van Gogh ordered a glass of Aban. He then threw the Aban and the glass at Gauguin. Gauguin ducked. The glass smashed against the wall. He helped Van Gogh home and put him to bed. The next morning, Van Gogh woke and said, 'My dear Gauguin, I have a dim recollection that I fear I may have offended you last night.' Vincent's dreams of artistic fraternity were turning into nightmares, and he was losing control of his fragile mental health. All was not well inside the Yellow House.

In Arles, Bernadette is still trying to establish the identity of the girl called Gabrielle. A friend passed her a copy of a little-known book on Van Gogh, which contained one crucial nugget of local knowledge about Gabby. Towards the end of the book, there are just four little lines, but they're really exciting. It says Rachel, who was called Gabby, died in 1952 at the age of 80. If this information is true, find anybody called Gabby who died around the age of 80 in 1952. This information completely changes the search, because only one person called Gabrielle died in Arles in 1952, but that person was a 19-year-old girl in 1888. In other words, 2 years too young, legally, to be a prostitute. Was that girl Gabby? If so, this will be a sensitive issue, because her descendants still live just outside Arles. So Bernadette got to go and see the family now. It's not going to be an easy one, though, because she’s got to talk to them and ask whether their family had a prostitute in it.

Café Terrace by night -Van Gogh.

The family live out of town in a small village. If they confirm Gabby's identity, one may finally understand what Vincent was doing at the brothel that night. But ultimately, they refused to be filmed or named. It's understandable. The man looked at me and said, 'Rachel's my great-grandmother.' It's a really dark family secret. Was she, or was she not? The family confirmed their ancestor Gabrielle was the girl who's always been called Rachel, but their stories only added to the doubts Bernadette had about her profession. Her age was not quite right. She married soon afterwards. It just didn't fit with her being a prostitute. And the story only began to fall into place when Bernadette realised she never was. What was she doing at the brothel, then? She was a cleaner.

In the archives, you find lists of cooks and cleaners. She was too young to be a prostitute, and I think that's why Vincent van Gogh actually met her in the street. That's why he didn't go into the brothel that night. But that's no cause for shame, is it? I mean, she was just a family ménage, a cleaner. She was just a small, meek working girl. This turns the traditional story on its head. Bernadette has found evidence that not only was Gabby a cleaner at the brothel, but she also worked at more than one of Vincent's favourite haunts on Place Lamartine; she wasn't his prostitute. She must have been a friend he saw every day.