- 7/18/2025
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00:00MUSIC
00:05In 1888, in Provence...
00:10..in the city of Arles...
00:14..an event occurred that would enter modern legend.
00:20In the red-light district on the northern edge of town,
00:23a foreigner arrived at the door of a brothel.
00:27He handed a package to one of the girls.
00:33That package contained a bloody piece of his own flesh.
00:39The man's name was Vincent van Gogh.
00:44At the time, he was an unknown and unsuccessful painter.
00:48But today, he's among the most celebrated artists of all time.
00:53That year in Arles has gone on to define him.
00:59The year he created his most treasured masterpieces.
01:04But also the time when he took a knife to his own ear.
01:12Vincent van Gogh was found in his bed at 7 in the morning
01:16on Christmas Eve, 1888.
01:19He was curled up in a fetal position,
01:22his head swathed in blood-soaked rags.
01:25The policeman who found him thought that he was dead.
01:31It's the most famous incident in the history of modern art.
01:36But no-one can agree what actually happened.
01:39We can't even be sure that he cut off his own ear.
01:47Now I'm joining one dedicated art lover living in Provence,
01:52who's been on a seven-year mission
01:55to uncover the forgotten truth behind the legend.
01:59There is something seriously wrong here.
02:02Hunting for every possible scrap of evidence.
02:06Eventually, you'll find this tiny little document here.
02:10Oh, my God, Father.
02:13And hidden clues in the paintings
02:16on an international journey
02:19that promises to solve the most perplexing art mystery of our times.
02:24Oh, mon Dieu, je l'ai trouvé.
02:27Oh, my God, I found it.
02:28The ancient town of Arles sits on the northern edge of the Camargue,
02:44a Roman city only 20 miles from the Mediterranean coast.
02:50Vincent van Gogh arrived here in 1888, aged 35.
02:56An unsuccessful artist escaping the sneers of Paris
03:03for a brighter and, as he thought, purer world down south.
03:10In April, he went to a bullfight.
03:12APPLAUSE
03:13Culturally, this town sits between France and Spain,
03:28famous as a romantic place of cowboys and gypsies,
03:32with its own language, culture and colourful costumes.
03:36When Van Gogh painted the scene,
03:39he focused on the exotic women in the stands,
03:44not the gory action in the arena.
03:48The crowd was magnificent, he wrote to a friend.
03:52The local women and girls in cheap, simple material,
03:55in green or red or pink or Havana yellow.
03:59And above it all, a sulphurous sun in a vibrant blue sky.
04:05It was all he said, as gay as Holland was dismal.
04:12It's hard at first not to get swept away in the spectacle.
04:19But it's not a fair fight and it has an inevitable end.
04:23For local people, the bloody end of these poor animals
04:32is the explanation for Vincent's own bloody episode in Arles.
04:39There's a local yarn that says that Van Gogh's cutting off of his ear
04:43and sending it to his girlfriend is explained by bullfighting
04:47because at the end of a successful contest,
04:49the bull's ear is cut off and sent to a lucky recipient in the audience.
04:58Unfortunately, the facts get in the way of this local legend.
05:03When Vincent was here, they didn't cut off the ears.
05:07That's a tradition they've imported from Spain.
05:15What happens here is, for the most part,
05:17impenetrable to outsiders.
05:20But the local story can't always be trusted.
05:26It's for that reason that Van Gogh's time here is so misunderstood.
05:37It would take a foreigner with local knowledge
05:40to help unravel the mystery.
05:42My favourite part of the day is to water the plants.
05:51Bernadette Murphy was once an art history student in London,
05:55but she moved to Provence back in 1983.
06:00After years living and working in the region,
06:03she knows the place and the people about as well as any outsider can.
06:07I'm a foreigner, fair enough, but there's also another term which they use here.
06:16An estranger.
06:18It means somebody who's not from their environment.
06:21So you'll always be probably an estranger in Provence,
06:26but slowly I'm pretty well integrated now.
06:28Bernadette became fascinated by the stories told about Provence's most famous estranger,
06:38Vincent van Gogh.
06:41She was astonished to discover how little was known for sure about his story
06:46and the night he's said to have cut off his ear.
06:49I kept thinking, aren't there police records? You know, aren't there medical records?
06:57How comes there's so much ambiguity about the whole story?
07:01And I thought, you know what?
07:03I'm going to look into this a little bit further.
07:06And so the adventure began.
07:07Since 2010, Bernadette has haunted the town record offices, libraries and archives of Arles.
07:26I'm going to look into this a little bit.
07:27I'm going to look into this a little bit.
07:29Hello.
07:31Hello.
07:35Her great advantage was that she had local knowledge and connections,
07:40and she knew her way around French bureaucracy.
07:44This is Robert, and then the third one.
07:47Her first instinct was to understand the scene of the crime.
07:52The place where Vincent supposedly cut off his ear.
07:56And, incidentally, the most famous artist studio of all time.
08:10The Yellow House was both the inspiration for some of van Gogh's most memorable paintings
08:15and the studio where many of his masterpieces were painted.
08:24It was on the northern edge of the city, on Place Lamartine,
08:29until 1944, when it was bombed in the war.
08:38I met Bernadette where it once stood,
08:40to get my first feel for the place that was the centre of van Gogh's world for nine months in Arles.
08:48And the place where this whole brilliant and gruesome story played out.
08:58You're actually standing more or less on the site of the Yellow House.
09:01This part of the Yellow House was the entry doorway.
09:06And the Yellow House wasn't flat at the front, it was sort of slightly triangular.
09:11So, over this way, this would be part of the studio,
09:15and above my head was Vincent's bedroom.
09:18But that building there is very recognisable from the painting, isn't it?
09:22It's the only one, really, that still exists.
09:23And how did Vincent van Gogh end up living here?
09:28He arrived in Arles, the station was over there,
09:30and he walked through the gates that are over there,
09:34through into the city, and took out a room in a hotel.
09:37Meanwhile, we know that he's painting in the fields beyond the station,
09:42and on the way he had to pass in front of a cafe,
09:44and the cafe was over there,
09:46and the lady who ran it, she'd been raised in the Yellow House,
09:48and her parents both died there.
09:51So, the house had not been lived in for about 18 months,
09:55when Vincent took it over.
10:00Vincent's painting gives a vivid sense of Place Lamartine as he knew it.
10:07In the background is the railway bridge leading to the station.
10:12In the foreground, roadworks where the gas main was being installed.
10:16And in the streets, his neighbours mill about on their way to and from the greengrocer.
10:26It's an image bursting with optimism.
10:30And yet it was behind those pretty green windows
10:34that he supposedly cut his own ear.
10:37How did van Gogh's life in Arles go so very badly wrong?
10:42The mystery all turns on events two nights before Christmas, 1888.
10:57The bare facts are reported in local press accounts.
11:00At 11.30, a man named Monsieur Vincent appeared at the door of a brothel on Rue de Boudard.
11:10He asked there for a girl named Rachel.
11:16When she arrived, he handed her his own severed ear.
11:21But can the reports really be trusted?
11:26More than one account gives his nationality not as Dutch but as Polish.
11:33Three versions say the ear was in a package.
11:37Another says he was holding it in place on his head.
11:41Most say this girl, Rachel, was a prostitute.
11:46But one says she was just a girl who worked at a cafe.
11:55With so many inconsistencies, Bernadette was determined to find out what,
12:01if anything, was true, even the fact that he cut off his ear.
12:04It's the one thing we think we all know about Vincent.
12:13But is it really just tabloid sensationalism?
12:17Because the world's foremost experts aren't convinced
12:22that's what actually happened.
12:24In Amsterdam is the beating heart of the world of Van Gogh.
12:39The Van Gogh Museum founded by his descendants.
12:47This magnificent museum holds the world's largest collection of his paintings
12:51and it's visited by nearly two million people a year.
12:59It's regularly asked to adjudicate upon amateur theories on Vincent.
13:08We're a museum about a very famous artist.
13:10And many people are always obsessive about the artist
13:13in the sense that they tend to think
13:15that they've got a personal relationship with him.
13:17And I have to tell you that there are many,
13:19well, I call them amateur historians,
13:22who are interested in questions of Van Gogh
13:24and tries to solve them by themselves.
13:27And Bernadette was such a person.
13:31Bernadette has been given access to the museum's own research centre.
13:36Great. Great. Thank you.
13:40She has asked to see the evidence which seems to cast doubt
13:44on the story that he cut off his ear.
13:45This notebook of an early biographer contains a letter from the painter Paul Signac,
13:55who visited Vincent shortly after his injury.
13:57So, it says,
14:00I saw him the last time in Arles in the spring of 1889.
14:07He was already at the hospital of the town.
14:09But the day of my visit he was perfectly okay
14:12and he had the famous band round his head and a fur hat.
14:16A few days earlier he had cut off the lobe of the ear and not the ear.
14:26Seeming to support this is a drawing that was made of Vincent on his deathbed a year and a half later by his doctor.
14:33And there's Vincent lying with his eyes shut and the ear, the top part of the ear perfectly intact.
14:41So, this confirms what Paul Signac said in 1921, an eyewitness statement and another eyewitness statement.
14:49So, there is something seriously wrong here.
14:54That a man would cut the lobe of an ear and it would become the most famous incident associated with any artist ever.
15:04I'm a little bit underwhelmed. It's a bit surprising.
15:09The newspapers all say that he cut off his ear, but these later eyewitnesses are clear it was only the lobe.
15:23Experts have long been perplexed by this disparity.
15:28Who to believe? That's always been the question.
15:31But, in general, for us, what we chose, what we found more reliable, is some of these people who were close to him, who saw him, who knew him for a couple of times and who saw him, and they said it was half the year.
15:44So, that has always been our point of view.
15:51Was the ear incident a major crisis?
15:55Or was it just a minor event that's been sexed up over time?
15:59Or was it just a minor event that's been sexed up over time?
16:09Unlike the vast majority of other artists, Vincent's life is as famous as his work.
16:17It's one of the reasons this museum in particular is so well attended.
16:21Of 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.
16:39People 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.
16:52For once, the word icon is the right one.
16:57These images stand for the modern belief that genius and self-destruction go hand in hand.
17:03So, if he didn't cut his ear off, is that whole story built on a lie?
17:15The man who arrived in Arles was 35 years old and had plenty in his background to suggest a tortured soul.
17:22Born in 1853, the son of a Dutch Protestant minister, those close to him long suspected he might be mentally ill.
17:36He was unable to sustain careers as an art dealer, a pastor, or as a teaching assistant.
17:43Instead of respectable relationships, he was drawn to peasants and poor street women, the only people who would put up with his weird, fanatical personality.
18:02You have a person who was alternately unbelievably depressive or unbelievably manic and also attached himself to people.
18:11If he found a friend, he wouldn't let that person go.
18:16But he was also terribly argumentative.
18:19So that left him literally in a life with almost no friendship and with a family that would despair over him.
18:27There 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 who he ordered his lunch from.
18:36So few of us can imagine the sheer agony of being Vincent van Gogh.
18:45The one person who stuck by him throughout was his younger brother Theo.
18:50Theo was a successful art dealer and it was he who took up the burden of setting Vincent back on the straight and narrow by offering to fund a new career for him as a painter.
19:04But he was unable to sell any of Vincent's dure early work.
19:11In February 1888, Vincent was a failed painter, totally dependent on his brother and suspected by many of being mentally ill.
19:23That seems easily enough to explain a nervous breakdown.
19:30But actually, the year it happened, things were all going pretty well.
19:40It was all going pretty well.
19:41On February 20th, he moved down to Arles, and there he took off on daily treks into the countryside,
20:07in search of inspiration for a new kind of art.
20:15When you think of the heat and the fact that he was carrying an easel and canvases, these walks must have been real marathons.
20:24What seduced him were the colours.
20:31He had abandoned completely the dreary old greys and browns of northern Europe,
20:37and here in southern France seemed to have discovered an entirely new world.
20:43To us, the landscape around Arles is quintessential Provence.
20:50But in Vincent's mind, it was dazzlingly alien.
20:55But whether it was the rich colours that surrounded him,
21:00or simply the fact that he was away from critical eyes,
21:04on these lonely country walks, he finally found his painting style.
21:11When he got where he wanted to be, he attacked the canvas.
21:15I follow no recognised system of brushwork, he said.
21:20I hit with irregular brush strokes which I leave as they are.
21:25I'm tempted to think that the results will be so worrying and annoying
21:31as not to please people with preconceived ideas about technique.
21:40He was right.
21:41No-one understood it at the time.
21:47But now we see his works in Arles as his masterpieces.
21:52He wrote to Theo that he'd found the future of modern art.
22:08And he dreamed that a whole movement of artists
22:11would soon join him on a shared mission, painting in the South.
22:22But what was it that changed Vincent
22:27from this optimistic dreamer
22:29into a mental patient capable of self-harm?
22:36Bernadette is convinced the answers have to lie
22:39in the town of Arles itself.
22:41She took me to the last place Vincent was seen the night he cut his ear.
22:56The Rue du Boudal, only 100 yards from the yellow house.
23:02He was seen there at a brothel at about 11.30pm.
23:14Well, this was the heart of the red light district in Arles in 1888.
23:18So these were all brothels, were they?
23:20Well, unfortunately, this was a convent
23:22and they complained incessantly about the noise.
23:26But, of course, the town fathers ignored that quite happily.
23:32What was it like on the street down here, then?
23:35I would imagine a pretty lively place.
23:38This whole street would have been comings and goings
23:41and quite a lot of noise.
23:43People were making complaints and saying the girls were making lewd remarks
23:46and there was screaming and yelling and all sorts of things going on.
23:49But we know that van Gogh was a frequent user of brothels, do we?
23:53Well, he and his brother talk about it quite openly in their letters.
23:55You know, it was part and parcel of life, I think, of a 19th century man.
23:59You just...
24:00You just went to the brothel.
24:01And Vincent equates it with, you know, having bread and food.
24:05I've, you know, got enough money for this.
24:08I haven't had a screw for three weeks.
24:10You know, he actually says that.
24:16Vincent frequented many of these brothels
24:19and he painted one giving us a sense of the atmosphere.
24:25But on the night of December the 23rd, he sought out one in particular.
24:30He crossed over the square.
24:32It's been identified at the end of the street.
24:37And he came directly to this house,
24:40which was the house of tolerance number one.
24:43That's what, somewhere around here, is it?
24:45It's actually here.
24:46Where these cars are parked now.
24:48It was absolutely here where these cars were parked.
24:50It was bombed by accident in the Second World War.
24:53What do we know about what happened?
24:54I mean, he knocked on the door and what happened then?
24:58Well, around 11.30 he turned up here.
25:01But he doesn't seem to go into the brothel.
25:03He asks for this girl called Rachel.
25:06At least that's what the local newspaper says.
25:08And presumably she came out into the street and he hands her a parcel.
25:16And he gives it to her and says something that seems almost biblical in reference.
25:21He says, take care of this, look after this carefully, do this.
25:25Keep a souvenir of me, a memory of me.
25:29Do this in remembrance of me?
25:31That's what I think, you see.
25:32Yeah, yeah.
25:33It's not something just done arbitrarily.
25:36It's done as a gift for her.
25:38What was going on here?
25:43Was Vincent in his madness trying to seduce this poor girl?
25:48Was he trying to scare her?
25:52Most intriguingly, he knows her.
25:55He asks for her by name.
26:00If we can find out who she was, maybe we can work out what he was doing
26:05and thereby understand the act itself a little better.
26:13For Bernadette, this kicked off the search for Rachel.
26:17A search in its way as intriguing as the question about his ear.
26:22So, I know that the prostitutes were all based in a particular part of town,
26:28which is Section E.
26:31In 19th century France, brothels were regulated by the state.
26:36They were called houses of tolerance.
26:40The prostitutes and the madams were recorded in the town census
26:44with delicate euphemisms for their jobs.
26:47Well, a lemonadeier is just a term that they use to describe somebody who was running a brothel.
26:55It could also be somebody who actually did sell lemonade,
26:57so you have to be a little bit careful about judging people like that.
27:00Lemonadier.
27:01So, I have to look for lemonadeier, and I have to look for a fille soumise.
27:07A fille soumise means a girl under the thumb, a submissive woman, literally.
27:14A girl under the thumb.
27:15And that's what you call prostitutes.
27:17So, if we go down, look at the ages.
27:19They're a little bit older than one would imagine.
27:2226, 29, 25, 30, 30, 28.
27:27They're not young women.
27:30Each of these names stands for a woman Vincent might have visited.
27:35Officially registered prostitutes, strictly over 21,
27:40whose ages and health status were all recorded by the state.
27:45But Bernadette can't find Rachel, the one girl she's looking for.
27:50When I look at all the girls who are indicated as fille soumise,
27:55they've got lots of names.
27:57Jeanne, Rose, Marguerite, Marie, Madeleine.
28:01But there are no Rachels here, whatsoever.
28:09Bernadette spent months trying to get to the bottom of this question.
28:13Why were there no Rachels in the town census?
28:20Then a clue emerged which completely changed everything.
28:26She revisited an old press article quoting the policeman
28:30who attended the scene of the crime.
28:34In it, he says,
28:36The prostitute's name escapes me,
28:39though her working name was Gabby.
28:45For Bernadette, there came a moment of realisation.
28:51Rachel is a highly unusual name in Arles.
28:56She went back to the records
28:57and found a document listing prostitutes.
29:00Many of the names were followed by the words
29:05Diete Rachel...
29:09..called Rachel.
29:13It's not their real name.
29:15It's just the nickname.
29:17You know, they have other names like Blondie and Redhead
29:19and silly things like that,
29:20but Rachel is one of the names that occurs linked into different girls.
29:25So maybe, although policeman Robert said Gabby was her working name,
29:30maybe he just got it wrong.
29:32Maybe it was her real name.
29:33It was her real name.
29:38There were no Rachels living in Arles in 1888,
29:42but there were 31 women called Gabrielle or Gabby.
29:49One of those women must have been the girl Vincent gave his ear to.
30:00If we can learn her identity,
30:01we may be able to understand what led him to give her his ear,
30:06or part of it.
30:09But there's another crucial character in this story
30:12who's far easier to track down.
30:18In the weeks before he cut his ear,
30:21Vincent had been living cheek by jowl
30:23with another great post-impressionist,
30:26the notorious Paul Gauguin.
30:29Gauguin was a very complicated and interesting painter
30:34and a very great one.
30:36But he was sort of a jerk.
30:38He had a very high opinion of himself.
30:41But he also must have been terribly charismatic,
30:43because not only did he draw women to him,
30:45but he also drew acolytes.
30:47One of his admirers was Vincent van Gogh.
30:54Gauguin was the man he went to first,
30:58when Vincent hit upon a plan to reinvent the Yellow House
31:02as an artist's studio or brotherhood.
31:04They lived there in a sort of commune or a medieval guild,
31:10or as he put it, like a band of Japanese Buddhist monks.
31:14And his art dealer brother Theo would feed them and clothe them
31:19and give them canvases and paint,
31:21and the artists would just create.
31:23Vincent spent weeks writing to Gauguin,
31:29persuading him to join him in his utopian idea.
31:32The sunflowers were painted to decorate Gauguin's bedroom.
31:38He bought 12 wicker chairs for the brother artists,
31:43and one ornate chair for Gauguin himself,
31:48whose age and success meant he would be the father superior
31:53in their community.
31:57But the real Gauguin couldn't have been more different
32:00to Vincent's monkish ideal.
32:03A canny ex-banker, self-publicist and serial adulterer.
32:09He arrives in Arles, this ladies' man,
32:14who has a pretty strong ego,
32:18and he finds himself in this house
32:22with this very difficult person
32:26with almost no self-esteem,
32:28who doesn't believe he can possibly find a woman
32:32to sleep with without paying her.
32:34And it's a terrible situation.
32:36He's only there because Theo is paying him to be there.
32:40And almost within days of arrival,
32:43he's sending his friends back in Paris letters saying,
32:46I've got to get out of here.
32:48I can't possibly take this any longer.
32:52Van Gogh's dream of brotherhood was doomed from the start.
32:57Not only did he and Gauguin have different personalities,
33:01they disagreed about art.
33:02Gauguin liked to paint from his imagination.
33:05He found laughable Vincent's habit of painting from life.
33:13He produced what seems a mocking portrait of Vincent painting the sunflowers.
33:20Vincent looked at it and said,
33:27that's me all right, but me gone mad.
33:32According to Gauguin, there's a sequel to this story.
33:37After he had shown Van Gogh the painting, the two of them went to a bar where Van Gogh ordered a glass of absinthe.
33:46He then threw the absinthe and the glass at Gauguin.
33:49Gauguin ducked, it smashed on the wall, and he helped Van Gogh home and put him to bed.
33:53The next morning Van Gogh woke up, saying,
33:58My dear Gauguin, I have a dim recollection that I fear I may have offended you last night.
34:07Vincent's dreams of artistic fraternity were turning into nightmares,
34:12and he was losing control of his fragile mental health.
34:15All was not well inside the yellow house.
34:32In Arles, Bernadette is still trying to establish the identity of the girl called Gabrielle,
34:38which old Vincent gave his ear to.
34:40The search has hit multiple dead ends and frustrations,
34:48until a friend passed her a copy of a little-known book on Van Gogh,
34:53which contained one crucial nugget of local knowledge about Gabby.
35:01Towards the end of the book, there are just four little lines, but for me they're really exciting.
35:06It says Rachel, who was called Gabby, died in 1952 at the age of 80.
35:16So what I have to do is find out if it really is true,
35:21whether I can find anybody called Gabby who died around the age of 80 in 1952.
35:28This information completely changes the search because only one person called Gabrielle died in Arles in 1952.
35:45But that person was a 19-year-old girl in 1888.
35:48In other words, two years too young legally to be a prostitute.
35:56Was that girl Gabby?
35:58If so, this will be a sensitive issue because her descendants still live just outside Arles.
36:05So I think I've really got to go and see the family then.
36:11It's not going to be an easy one though because I've got to talk to them and ask somebody if their family had a prostitute in the family.
36:21The family live out of town in a small village.
36:29If they confirm Gabby's identity, then we may finally understand what Vincent was doing at the brothel that night.
36:38But this is a secretive place.
36:41Bernadette met them the first time off camera and that cagey meeting was full of revelation.
36:47So we travelled there again in the hope of an interview.
37:01But ultimately they refused to be filmed or named.
37:06It's understandable because what they had to say was so sensitive.
37:10The man looked at me and said,
37:17Oh, Rachel's my great-grandmother.
37:24It's a really dark family secret.
37:27Well, it's only a dark family secret if she was a prostitute.
37:31And that's the whole problem.
37:33Was she or was she not?
37:35The family confirmed their ancestor, Gabrielle, was the girl who's always been called Rachel.
37:43But their stories only added to the doubts Bernadette had about her profession.
37:49Her age was not quite right.
37:53She married soon afterwards.
37:54It just didn't tie in with her being a prostitute.
37:56And the story only began to fall into place when I began to realise that she never was.
38:07What was she doing at the brothel then?
38:09She was a cleaner.
38:10In the archives, you find lists of cooks, cleaners.
38:16She was too young to be a prostitute.
38:19And that, I think, is why Vincent van Gogh actually met her in the street.
38:27That's why he didn't go into the brothel that night.
38:30But that's no cause for shame, is it?
38:32I mean, she was just a...
38:34She was a femme de menage, a cleaner, or...?
38:37Yeah.
38:38She was just a small, little, meek working girl.
38:44This turns the traditional story on its head.
38:49Bernadette has seen evidence that not only was Gabby a cleaner at the brothel,
38:55she also worked at more than one of Vincent's favourite haunts on Place Lamartine.
39:00She wasn't his prostitute.
39:03She must have been a friend he saw every day.
39:09We're now closer than ever before to a true picture of what drove Vincent the night he cut his ear.
39:18And there's also evidence in the paintings for what was really on his mind.
39:31The Krüller-Müller Museum, in the heart of the Dutch countryside,
39:36has brought out for inspection one little-known canvas by van Gogh.
39:42It's a painting he produced in the immediate aftermath of the night he cut his ear.
39:49And it has proved a mine of clues for experts as to Vincent's state of mind that night.
39:55Marika, what do we know about this painting?
40:01We know it's one of the first paintings that van Gogh made after getting back home when he was in the hospital,
40:09on which he just, well, arranged a still life with onions in the middle and a bottle, a coffee pot.
40:15This is a medical book, isn't it?
40:17It's a medical book for home use.
40:19This is a painting of the objects Vincent's mind dwelt upon as he tried to come to terms with what he'd done.
40:32Research has focused on the letter in the bottom right-hand corner,
40:37which we now know he received the very morning of the incident.
40:41A message from his brother.
40:43We know that because his handwriting is discernible.
40:51We also know that the envelope was stamped 67,
40:56and that's the number of the post office where his brother went to near his apartment in Paris.
41:02And then there is a franking mark here saying,
41:05and it was used during Christmas and New Year.
41:10So that's how we know that it must have been sent end of December.
41:15Do we know what was in the envelope?
41:17There's a theory that this is the actual letter in which his brother announces his engagement to your bar.
41:24And why would that upset him?
41:25Well, Theo, to him, was his dearest friend.
41:30He supported him emotionally and financially.
41:34He sent him about a hundred francs a month.
41:37So he might have been afraid of losing that.
41:40And it might have contributed to his mental breakdown.
41:46On December the 21st, 1888, Vincent's brother Theo became engaged to his fiancée, Joanna.
41:53Joanna.
41:56Van Gogh received the news on December the 23rd, the same day Gauguin told him he was leaving.
42:05Was this the moment Vincent lost his grip on reality?
42:12In the Yellow House did his mind teem with thoughts of his brother's happiness and Gauguin's betrayal?
42:19Gauguin himself later recorded Vincent's erratic conversation.
42:32Gothic novels were mentioned with a hero stalked by madness.
42:39He dwelt on the murders of prostitutes being reported in the papers.
42:43And the betrayal of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane when St. Peter the disciple cut off a centurion's ear.
42:53He was so bizarre that I couldn't take it, Gauguin wrote later.
42:59He even said to me, are you going to leave?
43:02And when I said yes, he tore this sentence from a newspaper and put it in my hand.
43:09It said, the murderer took flight.
43:15Horrified, Gauguin left to spend the night in a hotel, leaving Vincent alone with his demons.
43:22What happened next has remained a complete mystery.
43:32But evidence was to emerge from the last place you'd expect.
43:36In 1956, MGM Pictures released Lust for Life, starring an Oscar-nominated Kirk Douglas as Vincent van Gogh.
43:55Its overblown score and dramatic performances cemented in our minds the van Gogh of legend, slicing off his ear in a fit of madness.
44:04Experts have long since dismissed this version as histrionic.
44:11But ironically, this scene led Bernadette to a clue that ended up being crucial.
44:22Deep in the Van Gogh Museum archives, she found a letter in an old magazine about lust for life.
44:29It explains how Irving Stone, the writer behind the film, did his research into the ear.
44:39This is a letter that's dated 1955.
44:41I'd originally rejected it because it was so recent, and it's a reply to a man who had questioned Time magazine, who had done an article on Vincent van Gogh, and talked about him having cut off his whole ear.
44:55This man had written and said, no, no, no, no, he only cut off the lobe, everybody knows that, Paul Signac said.
45:01And this is from the editorial offices, and it says,
45:04When Irving Stone, the author of Lust for Life, was in Arles, he visited Dr. Felix Ray.
45:11Dr. Ray was the only man still alive who had seen Vincent van Gogh without his ear.
45:16But then it says something extraordinarily interesting.
45:20It says Dr. Ray drew a medical diagram for Irving Stone, which he later signed, and which Mr. Stone now has in his possession.
45:28It's dated 1955, so what I need to know is, is Felix Ray's medical diagram still somewhere?
45:41Felix Ray was the doctor who treated Vincent's injury throughout his time in the hospital.
45:50More than that, the two became friends, and Vincent painted him.
45:54There could be no better witness to what happened to Vincent van Gogh's ear.
46:01And somewhere, there's a document he gave to Hollywood writer Irving Stone answering exactly that question.
46:15The Irving Stone archive is kept in Berkeley, California.
46:18For Bernadette, this meant a journey across the world to San Francisco Bay.
46:37She's been emailing Berkeley's archivist David Kessler trying to track down Felix Ray's elusive drawing.
46:44This was sort of a ping-pong that went over a couple of days of me saying,
46:51Can you try this box? How about this? What about this?
46:55And him saying, Well, I haven't really got anything like that.
46:58After my fifth question, I said, Do you think you could just look one more time?
47:05And I went to bed that night.
47:10And I woke up the next morning, and there was an email in my inbox,
47:16you know, having mailed him all day long.
47:18And he said in French, Oh, my God, I found it.
47:29Now, finally, Bernadette is on her way to meet the man she's been corresponding with.
47:36And to see the document he says he's found.
47:39He just had, he discarded stuff as he went along, so only a very few things exist.
47:46So all of it fits in this box 91 of the collection.
47:49And in this, one of the things I finally found was a little document in the first folder,
47:56which demonstrates what you've been looking for, I think, which is what happened with the ear.
48:01And if you go through here, eventually you find this tiny little document here.
48:08Oh, my God, fathers.
48:10And it's from Dr. Ray Felix.
48:13Jack, I'm going to lose. I'm sorry.
48:16I worked so hard on this.
48:20I can't believe it. I can't believe it. After all these years, I'm so sorry.
48:24It's just a thin little tiny piece of paper here, but so much is so eloquent in its own way.
48:43This is from Dr. Felix Ray. I can definitely say that's his signature.
48:47It's dated the 18th of August, 1930. And it's, it's unbelievable.
48:52It's a before and after drawing, you know.
48:55And it says, I am so happy to be able to give you some information that you asked me concerning my unhappy friend, Van Gogh.
49:04I do hope that you glorify the genius of this remarkable painter, quarterly yours, Dr. Ray.
49:10And basically, it's a drawing of an ear, and it's a dotted line.
49:15And it says the ear was cut with a razor following the dotted line and the aspect that is left of the lobe of the ear.
49:25That's what it looked like afterwards.
49:27So it really documents that he removed his whole ear.
49:30It must have been an incredibly painful thing to do.
49:32And it's, what was going through his mind at that time must have been really remarkable.
49:36Well, I've been working, I think, as you know, on this for some time.
49:39And you just, when you finally get to see something, you realise what, what a, what a really gruesome thing happened.
49:57It brings home the violence of the act.
49:59Now, in Amsterdam, Bernadette has brought a copy of the document for verification by the Van Gogh Museum.
50:19Has she found the proof that eluded all the experts that Van Gogh did cut off his whole ear?
50:31This is what I found in Berkeley.
50:34The museum have deployed Theo Midendorp and Louis van Tilburg to see if this gains their seal of approval.
50:41This is, this amazing, isn't it? It's quite clear on what happened.
50:50So only a tiny piece of the lobe.
50:53Yeah, remained. There's no ambiguity.
50:56No, absolutely not.
50:58We wanted to make it clear by making two drawings.
51:01So we didn't want the point to be missed.
51:03The before and after.
51:04I mean...
51:06I couldn't have dreamt to finding anything so crazy, really.
51:07Well, this stands the received wisdom on the head, doesn't it?
51:10It makes it very clear.
51:11I mean, now you finally got a document of the person who saw him immediately after it happened.
51:17Who treated him.
51:18Who treated him and said that, er, well, that was a whole ear.
51:22And there's no reason now more to doubt about that.
51:24That's the information that he got from Ray.
51:26So he only could have got it from Ray.
51:28So that's, like, quite original, I would say.
51:31New evidence of Van Gogh is a rare commodity, let alone the final proof that he did cut off his ear.
51:40The museum has already begun negotiations for the document to star in a major new exhibition.
51:47It's an unprecedented achievement for an amateur researcher.
51:52It was really very thrilling, very thrilling.
51:56And there's kind of something quite special about finding something new about someone who's so famous.
52:01When you find something like that and you think, well, nothing's going to come of it.
52:06Is it really real?
52:08To have them say that it's a definitive answer to the question, my heart was beating.
52:16Not many of us can say we've contributed to history, really.
52:21I suppose you have.
52:22I suppose I have.
52:23How funny.
52:25It is. It's great fun.
52:29But when the excitement dies down, you're left with a story that's deeply unsettling.
52:37Not just a cliché, a piece of art trivia, but a harrowing moment for a desperate man.
52:44Not just one of us.
52:48People make jokes about Van Gogh's ear, but really what happened that night in the Yellow House was pretty disturbing.
52:56There he was, alone, surrounded by all these amazing paintings, which he couldn't sell.
53:03He thought about his life.
53:06He took a cutthroat razor and he cut his ear from top to bottom.
53:10He severed the artery behind his ear and rags were found later that he'd used to try to stem the flow of blood.
53:20But instead of calling a doctor, he hid the wound under a hat and made preparations to go out.
53:27He wrapped up the severed ear in newspaper and headed out to a brothel.
53:35That is the last piece of the jigsaw.
53:38Why did he do it?
53:42Why did he take his ear to Gabrielle at the brothel?
53:45There's one last fascinating twist to this story.
53:54Before Vincent came to Arles, he was living in Paris.
54:00And Bernadette has discovered that Gabby, the brothel cleaner, was there at the same time.
54:05So this was the site of the original Institut Pasteur.
54:12She was sent here to the Institut Pasteur in January 1888 to be treated for a bite by a rabid dog.
54:20I have a medical record here.
54:23As you can see, the name, her first name and her age.
54:28She was just 18 and she was bitten by a dog in Arles on the 8th of January around 3 o'clock in the afternoon.
54:36The young Gabrielle received 20 injections over a period of 18 days.
54:42Then she went back to Arles.
54:43Three weeks later, Vincent made the same journey.
54:49Because he goes to Arles very shortly after this, doesn't he?
54:53Yes, very shortly. I mean, it's literally...
54:55Did they meet here and did Vincent follow Gabby down south?
55:00I also have a letter.
55:02Bernadette at first dismissed the thought, but then she found a letter Vincent wrote later that year
55:08which mentions poor girls treated for rabies in this very institution.
55:16He was, at the very least, intrigued and moved to pity by her injury.
55:23So what do you think is the significance of this discovery?
55:27Well, I think Vincent had or was always attracted to people who, in difficulty,
55:32or he wanted to help in some way.
55:34So the notion of taking the ear to this particular girl, a girl who had a visible scar,
55:41somebody who had suffered, she becomes another of his wounded angels that he wanted to help.
55:49It's a tantalising thought that Gabby could have been the reason Van Gogh went to Arles in the first place.
55:56But it also suggests a new interpretation of what Vincent was doing by giving her his ear.
56:02Vincent had always been drawn to unfortunate women and nurtured Christ-like fantasies of martyring himself for the poor.
56:12It looks as if in his distress he saw giving Gabby his ear as an act of religious self-sacrifice and compassion.
56:20Van Gogh would end his own life only 18 months later.
56:28But Gabby lived on till she was 82 years old.
56:32This odyssey has transformed the whole debate about that night.
56:45This dangerous madman and this supposed prostitute have been shown for the real suffering people they were.
56:52And that presents a different picture of the man behind the canvas.
56:59Knowing what happened that night, knowing the whole story, changes entirely how you see these paintings.
57:05They're no longer just familiar masterpieces, but you see them entirely afresh.
57:11That brilliant but tragic year in Arles has left us with images that electrify the world.
57:21And now we can understand far better the story behind them.
57:25At the Van Gogh Museum, all the artworks and artefacts that led to these revelations are coming together.
57:37The confusing deathbed drawing.
57:40The still life with his brother's letter.
57:43The portrait he gave as a gift to Felix Ray.
57:46In a new exhibition on the verge of insanity that rewrites the legend of Vincent's descent into mental illness.
57:56And amidst the masterpieces, one tiny document forgotten by history that finally solves the mystery of Van Gogh's ear.
58:05Van Gogh's ear, the true story by Bernadette Murphy was a book of the week, available to listen to now at the BBC Radio 4 website.
58:17And for another documentary based on an artist's colourful history, Peggy Guggenheim, Art Addict, is available to watch now on BBC iPlayer.
58:25Next tonight, here on BBC Two, the National Lottery Live.
58:28The National Lottery Live.
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