Vincent van Gogh's ear  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

(Difference between revisions)
Jump to: navigation, search
Revision as of 19:47, 5 May 2014
Jahsonic (Talk | contribs)

← Previous diff
Revision as of 19:47, 5 May 2014
Jahsonic (Talk | contribs)

Next diff →
Line 12: Line 12:
==See also== ==See also==
*[[Ear]] *[[Ear]]
-*[[Van Gogh]]+*[[Vincent Van Gogh]]
-*[[Van Gogh's health]]+*[[Vincent Van Gogh's health]]
*[[Automutilation]] *[[Automutilation]]
{{GFDL}} {{GFDL}}

Revision as of 19:47, 5 May 2014

Last Sunday night at half past eleven a painter named Vincent Vangogh, appeared at the maison de tolérance No 1, asked for a girl called Rachel, and handed her ... his ear with these words:'Keep this object like a treasure.' Then he disappeared. The police, informed of these events, which could only be the work of an unfortunate madman, looked the next morning for this individual, whom they found in bed with scarcely a sign of life.
The poor man was taken to hospital without delay.
(Hulsker (1980), pp. 380-2)[1]

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

The precise chain of events that led to the celebrated incident of Vincent van Gogh slicing off his ear is not known reliably in detail. The only account attesting a supposed earlier razor attack on Gauguin comes from Gauguin himself some fifteen years later and biographers agree this account must be considered unreliable and self-serving. It does seem likely, however, that by 23 December 1888 van Gogh had realized that Gauguin was proposing to leave and that there had been some kind of contretemps between the two. That evening van Gogh severed his left ear (wholly or in part, accounts differ) with a razor, inducing a severe haemorrhage. He bandaged his wound and then wrapped the ear in paper and delivered the package to a brothel frequented by both him and Gauguin before returning home and collapsing. He was found unconscious the next day by the police

The local newspaper reported that van Gogh had given the ear to a prostitute with an instruction to guard it carefully. In Gauguin's later account he implies that in fact van Gogh had left it with the doorman as a memento for Gauguin. Van Gogh himself had no recollection of these events and it is plain that he had suffered an acute psychotic episode. Family letters of the time make it clear that the event had not been unexpected. He had suffered a nervous collapse in Antwerp some three years before and as early as 1880 his father had proposed committing him to an asylum (at Gheel). The hospital diagnosis was "generalized delirium", and within a few days van Gogh was sectioned.

During the initial few days of his treatment van Gogh repeatedly asked for Gauguin, but Gauguin stayed away. Gauguin told one of the policeman attending the case, "Be kind enough, Monsieur, to awaken this man with great care, and if he asks for me tell him I have left for Paris; the sight of me might prove fatal for him." Gauguin wrote of Van Gogh, "His state is worse, he wants to sleep with the patients, chase the nurses, and washes himself in the coal bucket. That is to say, he continues the biblical mortifications." Theo – notified by Gauguin – visited, as did both Madame Ginoux and Roulin. Gauguin left Arles and never saw Van Gogh again.

See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Vincent van Gogh's ear" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools