BBC The Mystery of Van Goghs Ear

in 1888 in Provence in the city of our [Music] an event occurred that would enter modern legend in the red-light district on the northern edge of town a foreigner arrived at the door of a brothel he handed a package to one of the girls that package contained a bloody piece of his own flesh 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 gone on to define him the year he created his most treasured masterpieces but also the time when he took a knife to his own here [Music] Vincent van Gogh was found in his bed at 7:00 in the morning on Christmas Eve 1888 he was curled up in a fetal position his heads waved in blood soaked rags the policeman who found him thought that he was dead it's the most famous incident in the history of modern art but no one can agree what actually happened we can't even be sure that he cut off his own ear now I'm joining one dedicated out lava living in Provence who's been on a seven-year mission to uncover the Forgotten truth behind the legend there is something seriously wrong here [Music] hunting for every possible scrap of evidence eventually you find this tiny little document oh my god photos and hidden clues in the paintings on an international journey that promises to solve the most perplexing art mystery of our times or Manju jelly toffee oh my god I found it the ancient town of owl sits on the northern edge of the Camargue a Roman city only 20 miles from the Mediterranean coast Vincent van Gogh arrived here in 1888 aged 35 an unsuccessful artist escaping the sneers of Paris for a brighter and as he thought pure a world down south [Music] in April he went to a bullfight [Applause] [Music] culturally this town sits between France and Spain famous as a romantic place of cowboys and gypsies with its own language culture and colorful costumes [Music] 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 in chief simple material in green red or pink Havana yellow and above it all a sulfurous son in a vibrant blue sky it was all he said as gay as Holland wasn't dismal it's hard at first not to get swept away in the spectacle but it's not a fair fight and it has an inevitable end [Music] for local people the bloody end of these poor animals is the explanation for Vincent's own bloody episode you know as a local yarn that says that van Gogh cutting off of 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 didn't 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 van Gogh's time here is so misunderstood [Music] it would take a foreigner with local knowledge to help unravel the mystery Bernadette Murphy was once an art history student in London but she moved to Provence back in 1983 after years living and working in the region she knows the place and the people about as well as any outsider can I'm a foreigner fair enough but there's also another term which they use here and this ecology it means somebody who's not from their environment so you'll always be probably in this country in Provence but slowly I'm pretty well integrated now Bernadette became fascinated by the stories told about Provence his most famous Astrology Vincent van Gogh [Music] she was astonished to discover how little was known for sure about his story and the night he said to have cut off his ear I kept thinking about their police records no aren't there medical records how comes there's so much ambiguity about the whole story and I thought you know what I'm gonna look into this a little bit further and so the adventure began [Applause] [Music] since 2010 Bernadette has haunted the town record offices libraries and archives of our her great advantage was that she had local knowledge and connections and she knew her way around French bureaucracy so Robbie her a peeler twas him 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 artists studio of all time [Music] the yellow house was both the inspiration for some of Van Gogh most memorable paintings and the studio where many of his masterpieces were painted it was on the northern edge of the city on PLAs Lamartine until 1944 when it was bombed in the war I met Bernadette where it once stood to get my first feel for the place that was the centre of Van Gogh swirled for nine months in all and the place where this whole brilliant and gruesome story played out you're actually standing more or less on the site of the other house this part of the yellow house was the door entry doorway and the yellow house wasn't flat at the front it was sort of slightly triangular so over this way this would be part of the studio and above my head was Vincent's bedroom but that building there is very recognizable from the painting isn't it it's the only one really that still exists Vincent van Gogh end up living here he arrived in all the station was over there and he walked through the gates that are over there through the into the city and took out the room in a hotel meanwhile we know that he's painting in the fields beyond the station and on the way he had to pass in front of a cafe and the cafe was over there and the lady who ran it she'd been raised in the yellow house and her parents 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 Platt Lamartine as he knew it in the background is the railway bridge leading to the station in the foreground roadworks where the gas main was being installed and in the streets his neighbor's mill about on their way to and from the greengrocer it's an image bursting with optimism and yet it was behind those pretty green windows that he supposedly cut his own here how did then gosh life in Argo so very badly wrong the mystery all turns on events two nights before Christmas 1888 the bare facts are reported in local press accounts at 11:30 a man named Monsieur vessel appeared at the door of a brothel or hoodoo Buddha he asks there 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 gives his nationality not as Dutch but as polish 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 [Music] with so many inconsistencies Bernadette was determined to find out what if anything was true even the fact that he cut off his ear it's the one thing we think we all know about Vincent but is it really just tabloid sensationalism because the world's foremost experts aren't convinced that's what actually happened [Music] in Amsterdam is the beating heart of the world of Van Gogh the van Gogh Museum founded by his descendants [Music] this magnificent Museum holds the world's largest collection of his paintings and it's visited by nearly two million people a year it's regularly asked to adjudicate upon amateur theories on Vincent we're a museum about a very famous artist that many people are almost obsessive about the artist in the sense that they tend to think that they've got a personal relationship with him and I have to tell you that there are many well I call them amateur historians who are interested in questions of Van Gogh and tries to solve them by themselves and then again such a person Bernadette has been given access to the museum's own research center great she is 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 porcine yak who visited Vincent shortly after his injury so it says I saw him the last time in our in the spring of 1889 it 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 cut off the lobe of the ear and not the ear seeming to support this is a drawing that was made of Vincent on his deathbed a year and a half later by his doctor and there's Vincent lying with his eyes shut and the ear the top part of the ear perfectly intact so this confirms what Paul senior said in 1921 and eyewitness statement and another eyewitness statement so there is something seriously wrong here that a man would cut the lobe of an ear and it would become the most famous incident associated with any artist ever I'm a little bit underwhelmed it's a bit surprising the newspapers all say that he cut off his ear but these later eyewitnesses are clear it was only the lobe experts have long been perplexed by this disparity who to believe that's always been the question but in general for us the what we chose what we found the more reliable is some of these people who were close to him who saw him who knew him for a couple of times in his song and they said it was half the year so that has always been our point of view [Music] was the ear incident a major crisis or was it just a minor event that's been sexed up over time [Music] 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-portrait 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 our 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 those close to him long suspected he might be mentally ill he was unable to sustain careers as an art dealer a pastor or as 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 you have a person who was alternately unbelievably depressive or unbelievably manic who and also 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 literally in a life with almost no friendship and with a family that would despair over him 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 who ordered his lunch from so a few of us can imagine the sheer agony of being disobey God was his younger brother Theo Theo 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 but he was unable to sell any of Vincent's dürer 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 the year it happened things were all going pretty well [Music] On February the 20th he moved down to Al and there he took off on daily treks into the countryside in search of inspiration for a new kind of art when you 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 were the colors he had abandoned completely the dreary old grays and browns of Northern Europe and here in southern France seemed to have discovered an entirely new world to us the landscape around al is quintessential Provence but in Vincents mind it was dazzlingly alien but whether it was the rich colors 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 here tact the canvas I follow no recognized system of brushwork he said I hit with irregular brushstrokes which I leave as they are 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 in our 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 [Music] Bernadette is convinced the answers have to lie in the town of are itself [Music] she took me to the last place Vincent was seen the night he cut his ear the root of boo dal only 100 yards from the yellow house he was seen there at a brothel at about 11:30 p.m. well this was the heart of the red-light district in our win 1888 so these were all brothels were they well unfortunately this was a convent and they complained incessantly about the noise but of course the tongue fathers ignored that quite happily what was it like on the street down here then I already imagine a pretty lively place this whole streets would have been comings and goings and quite a lot of noise people were making complaints and saying the girls are making lewd remarks and there was screaming and yelling and all sorts of things going on but we know that van Gogh was a frequent user of brothels - well he and his brother talked about it quite openly in their letters you know it was part and parcel of life I think of a 19th century man you just you just went to the brothel and and Vincent equates it with you know having bread and food I've you know I've got enough money for this I haven't had a screw for three weeks you know he actually says that [Music] Vincent frequented many of these brothels and he painted one giving us a sense of the atmosphere but on the night of December the 23rd he sought out one in particular he crossed over the square it's been identified at the end of the street and came directly to this house which was the house of Tolerance number one that's what somewhere around here is it it's actually here where these guys I don't mean here where these cars were parked it was bombed by accident in the Second World War what do we know about what happened to be knocked on the door and what happened then well around 11:30 he turned up here but he doesn't seem to go into the brothel he asks for this girl called Rachel least that's what the local newspaper says and presumably she came out into the street and he hands her a parcel and he gives it to her and says something that seems almost biblical of reference he says take care of this look after this carefully do this keep a souvenir of me remember a memory of me do this in remembrance that's what I feel it's not something just done arbitrarily it's 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 knows her he asks for her by named if we can find out who she was maybe we can work out what he was doing and thereby understand the act itself a little better for Bernadette this kicked off the search for Rachel a search in its way as intriguing as the question about his ear so I know that the prostitutes were all based in a particular part of town which is section e in 19th century France brothels were regulated by the state they were called houses of tolerance the prostitutes and the Madam's were recorded in the town census with delicate euphemisms for their jobs well alumina is just a term that they use to describe somebody who was running a brothel it could also be somebody who actually did sell lemonade so you have to be a little bit careful about judging people like that lemonade year so I have to look for lemonade year and I have to look for feasts amis FC soomi's means a girl under the thumb a submissive woman literally a girl under the thumb and that's what you call prostitutes so if we go down look at the ages they're a little bit older than one would imagine 26 29 25 30 30 28 they're not young women each of these names stands for a woman Vincent might have visited officially registered prostitutes strictly over 21 whose ages and health status were all recorded by the state but Bernadette can't find Rachel the one girl she's looking for when I look at all the girls who are indicated as fee soomi's they've got lots of names Jan Marguerite Muffy Madeleine but they're no Rachel's here whatsoever Bernadette spent months trying to get to the bottom of this question why were there no Rachel's in the town census [Music] then a clue emerged which completely changed everything she revisited an old press article quoting the policeman who attended the scene of the crime in it he says the prostitutes name escapes me though her working name was Gabby for Bernadette there came a moment of realization Rachael is a highly unusual name in our she went back to the records and found a document listing prostitutes many of the names were followed by the words deep are shell called Rachel it's not their real name it's just the nickname you know they have other names like blondie and redhead and silly things like that but rachel is one of the names that occurs linked into different girls so maybe although police maja bear said Gaby was her working name maybe he just got it wrong maybe it was her real name there were no Rachel's living in our 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 if we can learn her identity we may be able to understand what led him to give her his ear or part of it but there's another crucial character in this story who's far easier to track down in the weeks before he cut his ear Vincent had been living cheek by jowl with another great post-impressionists the notorious Paul Gauguin co-chairs are very complicated and interesting painter and a very great one but he was sort of a jerk he had a very high opinion of himself but he also must have been terribly charismatic because not only did he draw women to him but he also drew acolytes 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 lived there in a sort of commune or a medieval guild or as he with it like a band of Japanese Buddhist monks and his art dealer brother Theo will feed them and clothe them and give them canvases and paint and the artists would just create Vincent spent weeks writing to go gam persuading him to join him in his utopian idea the sunflowers were painted to decorate googas bedroom he bought twelve wicker chairs for the brother artists and one ornate chair for Goga himself whose age and success meant he would be the father superior in their community but the real Goga couldn't have been more different to Vincent's monkish ideal a Kenny ex-banker self publicist and serial adulterer he arrives in are all this ladies man who has a pretty strong ego and he finds himself in this house with this very difficult person with almost no self-esteem who doesn't believe he can possibly find a woman to sleep with without paying her and it's it's a terrible situation he's only there because Theo is paying him to be there and almost within days of arrival he's sending his friends back in Paris letters saying I got to get out of here I can't possibly take this any longer van Gogh's dream a brotherhood was doomed from the start not only did he and Goga have different personalities they disagreed about art Guga like to paint from his imagination he found laughable Vincent's habit of painting from life he produced what seems a mocking portrait of Vincent painting the sunflowers Vincent looked at it and said that's me all right but me gone mad according to Gogan there's a sequel to this story after he had shown van Gogh the painting the two of them went to a bar where van Gogh ordered a glass of absinthe he then threw the absinthe and the glass at Gauguin Gauguin ducked it smashed on the wall and he helped van Gogh home and put him to bed the next morning van Gogh woke up saying my dear Goga 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 [Music] or was not well inside the yellow house [Music] in all Bernadette is still trying to establish the identity of the girl called Gabrielle we're told Vincent gave his ear to the search has hit multiple dead ends and frustrations until 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 for me they're really exciting it says Rachel who was called Gabby died in 1952 at the age of 80 so what I have to do is find out if it really is true whether I can 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 our in 1952 [Music] but that person was a 19 year old girl in 1888 in other words two 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 I'll so I think I've really got to go and see the family never it's not gonna 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 the family live out of town in a small village if they confirm Gabby's identity then we may finally understand what Vincent was doing at the brothel that night but this is a secretive place Bernadette met them the first time off-camera and that cagey meeting was full of revelation [Music] so we traveled there again in the hope of an interview but ultimately they refused to be filmed or named it's understandable because what they had to say was so sensitive the man looked at me and said Oh Rachel my great-grandmother it's a really dark family secret it's only a dark family secret if she was a prostitute and that's the whole problem 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 tie in with her being a prostitute and the story only began to fall into place when I began to realize that she never was what was he doing in the brothel when she was a cleaner only in the archives you find lists of cooks cleaners she was too young to be a prostitute and that I think is why Vincent van Gogh actually met her in the in the street that's why he didn't go into the broth of that night but that's no cause for shame is it I mean she was just she was a family man as a cleaner oh yeah she was just a small little meek working girl this turns the traditional story on its head Bernadette has seen evidence that not only was Gabi a cleaner at the brothel she also worked at more than one of Vincent's favorite haunts on PLAs Lamartine she wasn't his prostitute she must have been a friend he saw every day we're now closer than ever before to a true picture of what drove Vincent the night he cut his ear and there's also evidence in the paintings for what was really on his mind [Music] the crueler Muller Museum in the heart of the Dutch countryside has brought out for inspection one little-known canvas by Van Gogh it's a painting he produced in the immediate aftermath of the night he cut his ear and it has proved a mine of clues for experts as to Vincent state of mind that night marika what do we know about this painting we know it's one of the first paintings that faux hawk made after getting back home when he was in the hospital under which he just arranged still live with onions in the middle and a bottle a coffee pod this is a medical book isn't it it's a medical book for home news this is a painting of the objects Vincent's mind dwelt upon as he tried to come to terms with what he'd done research has focused on the letter in the bottom right hand corner which we now know he received the very morning of the incident a message from his brother we know that because his handwriting is discernible we also know that the envelope was stemmed 67 and it's the number of the post office where his brother went to near his apartment in Paris and then there is franking mark here saying rule alone and it was used during Christmas and New Year so that's how we know that it must have been sent end of December do we know what was in the envelope there's a theory that this is the actual letter in which his brother announces his engagement to yo born and why would that upset him well Theo to him was his dearest friend he supported him emotionally and financially he send him about a hundred francs a month so he might have been afraid of losing that and it might have contributed to his mental breakdown on December the 21st 1888 Vincent's brother Theo became engaged to his fiancee Joanna van Gogh received the news on December the 23rd the same day Goggan told him he was leaving was this the moment Vincent lost his grip on reality in the yellow house did his mind teem with thoughts of his brother's happiness and gogans betrayal Goga himself later recorded Vincent's erratic conversation gothic novels were mentioned with a hero stalked by madness he dwelt on the murders of prostitutes being reported in the papers and the betrayal of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane Winston Peter the disciple cut off a Centurions here he was so bizarre that I couldn't take it Goggan wrote later he even said to me are you going to leave and when I said yes he told this sentence from a newspaper and put it in my hand it said the murderer took flight horrified go gal left to spend the night in a hotel leaving Vincent alone with his demons [Music] what happened next has remained a complete mystery but evidence was to emerge from the last place you'd expect [Music] in 1956 MGM Pictures released lust for life starring and oscar-nominated Kirk Douglas as Vincent van Gogh it's overblown score and dramatic performances cemented in our minds the van Gogh of legend slicing off his ear in a fit of madness experts have long since dismissed this version as histrionic but ironically this scene led Bernadette to a clue that ended up being crucial deep in the van Gogh Museum archives she found a letter in an old magazine about lust for life it explains how her veins stone the writer behind the film did his research into the ear this is a letter that stated 1955 I'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 Vincent van Gogh and talked about him having cut off his whole ear this man had written and said no no no he only cut off the lobe everybody knows that Paul senior said so and this is from the editorial offices and it says when Irving stone the author of lust for life was in all he visited dr. Felix Ray dr. a was the only man still alive who had seen Vincent van Gogh without his ear but then it says something extraordinarily interesting it says dr. ray drew a medical diagram for Irving stone which he later signed and which mr. stone now has in his possession is dated 1955 so what I need to know is his Felix Ray's medical diagram still somewhere Felix ray was the doctor who treated Vincent's injury throughout his time in the hospital more than that the two became friends and Vincent painted him there could be no better witness to what happened to Vincent van Gogh here and somewhere there's a document he gave to Hollywood writer irving stone answering exactly that question the irving stone archive is kept in berkeley california for Bernadette this meant a journey across the world to San Francisco Bay she's been emailing Berkeley's archivist David Kessler trying to track down Felix Ray's elusive drawing this was sort of a ping-pong that went over a couple of days of me saying can you try this box how about this what about this and him saying well I haven't really got anything like that after my fifth question I said do you think you could just look one more time and I went to bed that night and I woke up the next morning and there was an email in my inbox you know having mailed him all day long and he said in French or more usually Tovey oh my god I found it now finally Bernadette is on her way to meet the man she's been corresponding with and to see the document he says he's found he just had the discarded stuff as he went along so only a very few things exist so all that fits in this box 91 of the collection and in this one of the things I finally found with a little document in the first folder which demonstrates what you've been looking for I think which is what happened with the ear and if you go through here eventually you find this tiny little document here oh my god fellows I'm dr. ray Felix I can't believe it I can't believe it's just a thin little tiny piece of paper here and so much is so eloquent in its own way [Music] this is from dr. Felix ray I can definitely say that's his signature it's dated the 18th of August 1930 and it's it's unbelievable it's a before-and-after drawing you know and it says I am so happy to be able to give you some information that you asked me concerning my unhappy friend van Gogh I do hope that you glorify the genius of this remarkable painter cordially yours dr. ray and basically it's the drawing of an ear and there's a dotted line and 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 that's what it looked like afterwards so it's really documents that he removed his whole ear it must have been an incredibly painful thing to do and it's what was going through his mind at that time was really remarkable well I've been working I think as you know on this for some time and you just when you finally get just you realize what what a what a really gruesome thing you'd happened it brings home the violence of the act [Music] now in Amsterdam Bernadette has brought a copy of the document for verification by the van Gogh Museum has she found the proof that eluded all the experts that van Gogh did cut off his whole ear this is what I found in Berkeley the museum have deployed Te'o Middendorf and Louie van Tilburg to see if this gains their seal of approval this is amazing it's quite clear on what happened so only a tiny piece of the lobe yeah remain there's no ambiguity no no not yet don't even wanted to make it clear by making two drawings yes mister yeah I mean I couldn't have dripped to finding anything so crazy really well this stands they received wisdom on the head doesn't it it makes it very clear any now you finally got the document of the person who saw him immediately after it happened to you treated him you were treated him and said that that wasn't there's no reason now more to doubt about that that's the service that he got from right so the only good could have gotten from rays so that makes it quite original I would say new evidence of Van Gogh is a rare commodity let alone the final proof that he did cut off his ear the museum has already begun negotiations for the document to star in a major new exhibitions it's an unprecedented achievement for an amateur researcher it was really very thrilling very throwing and this kind of something quite special about finding something new about someone who's so famous when you find something like that and you think well nothing's going to come of it is it really real to have them say that it's the definitive answer to the question I've my heart was beating not my name is gonna say we've contributed to history really I suppose you have I suppose I have how funny it is it's great fun but when the excitement dies down you're left with a story that's deeply unsettling not just a cliche a piece of art trivia but a harrowing moment for a desperate man people make jokes about Van Gogh Cyr but really what happened that night in the yellow house was pretty disturbing there he was alone surrounded by all these amazing paintings which he couldn't sell he thought about his life he took a cutthroat razor and he cut his ear from top to bottom he severed the artery behind his ear and rags were found later that he'd used to try to stem the flow of blood but instead of calling a doctor he hid the wound under a hat and made preparations to go out he wrapped up the severed ear in newspaper and headed out to a brothel that is the last piece of the jigsaw why did he do it why did he take his ear to Gabrielle at the brothel there's one last fascinating twist to this story before Vincent came to all he was living in Paris and Bernadette has discovered that Gabby the brothel cleaner was there at the same time so this was the site of the original institut pasteur she was sent here to the institut pasteur in january 1888 to be treated for a bite by a rabid dog I have a medical record here as you can see the name her first name and her age she was just 18 and she was bitten by a dog you know on the 8th of January around 3 o'clock in the afternoon the young Gabrielle received 20 injections over a period of 18 days then she went back to our three weeks later Vincent made the same journey because he goes to all very shortly after this doesn't did they meet here and did Vincent follow Gabby down south I also have a letter Bernadette at first dismissed the thought but then she found a letter Vincent wrote later that year which mentions poor girls treated for rabies in this very institution he was at the very least intrigued and moved to pity by her injury so what do you think is the significance of this discovery well I think Vince enhance or was always attracted to people who in difficulty or he wanted to help in some way so the notion of taking the ear to this particular girl a girl who had a visible scar somebody who had suffered she becomes a moon another of his wounded angels that he wanted to help it's a tantalizing thought that Gabi could have been the reason van Gogh went a while in the first place but it also suggests a new interpretation of what Vincent was doing by giving her his ear Vincent had always been drawn to unfortunate women and nurtured christ-like fantasies of martyring himself for the poor it looks as if in his distress he saw giving Gabi his ear as an act of religious self-sacrifice and compassion van Gogh would end his own life only eighteen months later but Gabi lived on till she was 82 years old this Odyssey has transformed the whole debate about that night this dangerous madman and this supposed prostitute have been shown for the real suffering people they were and that presents a different picture of the man behind the canvass knowing what happened that night knowing the whole story changes entirely how you see these paintings they're no longer just familiar masterpieces but you see them entirely afresh that's brilliant a tragic year in our has left us with images that electrify the world and now we can understand far better the story behind them at the van Gogh Museum all the artworks and artifacts that led to these revelations are coming together the confusing deathbed drawing the still life with his brothers letter the portrait he gave as a gift to felix ray in a new exhibition on the verge of insanity that rewrites the legend of Vincent's descent into mental illness and amidst the masterpieces one tiny document forgotten by history that finally solves the mystery of Van Gogh seer van gogh seer the true story by Bernadette Murphy was a book of the week available to listen to now at the BBC Radio 4 website and for another documentary based on an artist's colorful history Peggy Guggenheim art addict is available to watch now on BBC iplayer next night here on BBC two the National Lottery live [Music]

Channel: Karin Ek

Views: 197,695

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Id: AgMBRQLhgFE

Length: 58min 39sec (3519 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 02 2017