Gauguin and van Gogh’s Ear

The meme below was undoubtedly the funniest one I came across after the assassination attempt on Trump last year. It’s a clever riff on van Gogh’s self-portrait soon after he chopped his ear with a razor. I bring this up now as I had forgotten that the reason for his act was his tiff with Paul Gauguin, another maverick of the art world.

Gauguin’s life was a miserable one.  He spent his childhood in Lima, Peru, living with his great-uncle. In Paris, he briefly found success as a stockbroker, accumulating wealth. However, following a market crash, he lost everything and was forced to take on odd jobs, including digging in the Panama Canal. In 1888, while in France, he spent time in Arles, living with Vincent van Gogh, a watershed moment in the history of art. Soon after this, in 1891, at the age of 43, he sails of to Tahiti in the Pacific, leaving his wife and children in Europe and dies there in 1903 (after marrying two women and fathering a few children).

Coming back to Vincent, the Sunflower series of paintings for which van Gogh is world famous today, was drawn for Gauguin:

When, in July, Gauguin had written a letter encouraging Vincent to expect him, Vincent had spent one frenzied week in August painting the Sunflowers series for which he is so famous. Six Sunflowers, Fourteen Sunflowers, Fifteen Sunflowers. All achieved between 21 and 26 August. All for Gauguin. All composed of complementary colours. To hang in Gauguin’s room like a huge welcoming bouquet, as he wrote to Theo. {his brother}

Sue Prideaux in Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, examines this episode of van Gogh’s ‘ear’ in detail. Van Gogh was probably schizophrenic and bipolar. After a tiff with Gauguin the previous night:

Turning, he saw Vincent rushing towards him with an open razor in his hand. ‘My gaze at that moment must have been quite powerful, for he stopped and, lowering his head, set off running towards home.’ For years later, Gauguin would continue to question himself; might the outcome have been different if he had disarmed Vincent and tried to calm him down? ‘I have often examined my conscience about this.’ But he was frightened. He didn’t dare go back to the Yellow House. Instead, he went to a hotel where he didn’t manage to get to sleep until three in the morning. He woke at half past seven. Going straight to the square, he saw a great crowd gathered round the Yellow House, and gendarmes trying to keep order. Elbowing his way through, he learned that Vincent had gone back to the house and cut off his ear close to the head. When he had staunched the flow of blood he pulled on a Basque beret and went to the brothel, where he gave the person on duty his ear in an envelope, saying, ‘Here is a souvenir of me.’ Then he ran home and up the stairs to his bedroom where he shut the shutters, lit an oil lamp, placed it on the table, and went to sleep.

One version also argues that Vincent wrapped his ear in a piece of paper and walked up to the brothel and delivered it to his favorite prostitute Rachel, who understandably fainted. If Vincent had bled to death without a witness, Gauguin would have been sentenced to death for sure.

A day earlier, van Gogh had received a letter from his brother Theo informing him of his engagement. Most historians now agree that this ‘loss’ was something that poor Vincent couldn’t tolerate and which broke him. Theo was the anchor of his life. This aspect was movingly explored in Irving Stone’s Lust for Life – one of the greatest works of literature.