XIII. Did Van Gogh give any hints in his artworks?

 

Apart from the remarkable hints in his letters, Van Gogh reacted to Gauguin's defamatory legend also in some artworks. Early in January 1889, a few days after having provisionally recovered he was released from the hospital and returned to his Yellow House where he painted the famous two versions of "Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear". These self-portraits do not at all represent a man who had harmed himself a short time ago, in a fit of madness, and might be ashamed. To the contrary, they show the bandaged ear, traces of the injury in a proud and accusatory way. They should be seen as an indictment against Gauguin.

At the same time, there is also reason to reinterpret Van Gogh's paintings of Madame Roulin ("La Berceuse") with a piece of rough rope in her hands.42 Van Gogh was just working on the first version of that portrait when he was interrupted by the ear-cutting incident. After his recovery, he resumed working on it and with reference to Daudet's novel "Tartarin sur les Alpes" (see Question 12), he added a rope with cut ends to it.

Read more about the portraits of Mme Roulin, "La Berceuse" in our special.

 

42. F 508, JH 1671; reproduced in Druick/Zegers 2001, p. 261↩

 

  

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a hasty escape

  • Gauguin was eager to leave Arles as fast as possible. The situation had become too hot for him. After having alerted Vincent’s brother Theo by wire, he left for Paris that evening of the same day, 24 December 1888. In his hasty departure, he left behind not only his wounded friend and the Yellow House, but also most of his personal belongings such as studies, sketchbooks, some of his fencing equipment masks and gloves, even his keys
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special:

Vincent van Gogh and the series La Berceuse, Arles 1888–1889.

The period that Vincent van Gogh spent in Arles and Saint-Rémy from 1888 to 1890 undoubtedly belongs to the most creative phase of his artistic career. The existence of the almost identical paintings of Madame Augustine Roulin, the wife of the Arles postmaster, is consequently all the more surprising.
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The Corpus Delicti Is a Corpuscle

  • It can be said that with the exception of the sister-in-law Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, who had family-related reasons for playing down the injury, not a single witness speaks of a severed earlobe. On the contrary, the mutually independent statements by the principal witness Paul Gauguin, the prostitute who was given the ear, the gendarme who was on duty in the red-light district, the investigating police officer and the local newspaper report, accord with the evidence that the artist’s unfortunate “self-mutilation” involves the entire (left) ear.
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