Van Gogh's Ear

Reviews

This book has the pace of a detective novel, sending fresh blood pulsing through an old tale as Murphy recreates the heartbreaking drama of Van Gogh’s loosening grip on reality. Murphy’s revelations are fascinating and add intriguing details to the great crisis of Van Gogh’s life. Murphy’s book rescues the real Van Gogh from the lazy clichés of tea towel memorabilia by painting an electric, nuanced portrait of a man who achieved artistic brilliance despite his mental health issues and not because of them. In doing so, she allows for a version of his history in which her subject’s passion for life, art and humanity blooms like the sunflowers he painted. She knows Provence with an intimacy that’s rare in the ear genre. Her descriptions of the people, their landscape, their customs are unusually detailed… Her second stand-out quality is a doggedness that goes beyond the usual art-historical drives. Relentlessly she wrestles with the book’s central mystery. No one before has built up such a detailed picture of the people who surrounded the great artist. Legend has it that Van Gogh cut off the ear to send to a woman he loved, surely one of the most ineffective instances of flirting in cultural history. However, Murphy’s sleuthing allowed her to track down the girl that Van Gogh gave his ear to, who turned out to be a cleaner in a brothel. She also found a document drawn up by Dr Felix Rey, who cared for Van Gogh after the incident, which confirms that the ear was brutally severed. It is arguably the best-known story in the history of art: Vincent van Gogh lops off part of his ear in a moment of insanity and drops it off at a brothel. The facts behind how the artist mutilated himself and what happened next can now be told for the first time, according to experts, after crucial medical evidence was discovered. Bernadette Murphy, the researcher who discovered the letter and traced the family of the unknown girl, has now speculated that Van Gogh could have been offering his own flesh in a noble but deluded attempt to help heal her. The horror of Vincent van Gogh cutting off his ear in 1888 is one of the most famous incidents in art history...Now dramatic discoveries are painting the real story in a new light...When [Bernadette Murphy] presented her research to experts at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, they were astonished. A recently discovered letter from Félix Rey, the doctor who treated Van Gogh in the hospital...was found in an American archive by Bernadette Murphy. The discovery brings an end to a long-standing biographical question. Bernadette Murphy...discovered a document in an American archive. A note written by Félix Rey, a doctor who treated van Gogh at the Arles hospital, contains a drawing of the mangled ear showing that the artist indeed cut off the whole thing. Murphy...was also able to identify the woman to whom van Gogh gave his ear. Expand reviews