The Mystery of Van Gogh's Ear

This programme contains some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

In 1888, in Provence... in the city of Arles,

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 is among the most celebrated artists of all time.

That year in Arles 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 ear.

Vincent van Gogh was found in his bed at seven in the morning

on Christmas Eve, 1888.

He was curled up in a foetal position,

his head swathed 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 art lover 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.

Hunting for every possible scrap of evidence...

Eventually, you find this tiny little document here.

Oh, my godfathers.

..and hidden clues in the paintings on an international journey

that promises to solve the most perplexing art mystery of our times.

Oh, mon Dieu, je l'ai trouve.

Oh, my God, I've found it.

The ancient town of Arles 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, purer world down south.

In April, he went to a bullfight.

Culturally, this town sits between France and Spain,

famous as a romantic place of cowboys and gypsies,

with its own language,

culture and colourful costumes.

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 cheap,

"simple material in green and red or pink or Havana yellow.

"And, above it all, a sulphurous sun in a vibrant blue sky.

"It was all," he said, "as gay as Holland was 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.

For local people, the bloody end of these poor animals

is the explanation for Vincent's own bloody episode in Arles.

There's a local yarn that says that van Gogh's 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.

It would take a foreigner with local knowledge

to help unravel the mystery.

My favourite part of the day is to water the plants.

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 - an "estranger".

It means somebody who's not from their environment.

So, you'll always be, probably, an estranger in Provence,

but slowly I'm pretty well-integrated now.

Bernadette became fascinated by the stories told about Provence's

most famous estranger, Vincent van Gogh.

She was astonished to discover how little was known for sure

about his story, and the night he's said to have cut off his ear.

I kept thinking, "Aren't there police records?"

You know. "Aren't there medical records?

"How come there's so much ambiguity about the whole story?"

And I thought, "You know what?

"I'm going to look into this a little bit further."

And so the adventure began.

Since 2010, Bernadette has haunted the town record offices,

libraries and archives of Arles.

-Bonjour.

-Bonjour.

-Ca va?

Her great advantage was that she had local knowledge and connections,

and she knew her way around French bureaucracy.

SHE SPEAKS FRENCH

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.

The Yellow House was both the inspiration for some of Van Gogh's

most memorable paintings and the studio

where many of his masterpieces were painted.

It was on the northern edge of the city, on Place 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's world for nine months in Arles

and the place where this whole brilliant

and gruesome story played out.

You're actually standing more or less

on the site of the Yellow House.

This part of the Yellow House was the 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 recognisable from the painting, isn't it?

It's the only one, really, that still exists.

And how did Vincent van Gogh end up living here?

He arrived in Arles, the station was over there,

and he walked through the gates that are over there,

through into the city, and took out a 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 Place 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 neighbours 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 ear.

How did Van Gogh's life in Arles go 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 Vincent appeared

at the door of a brothel on Rue du Bout d'Arles.

He asked 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.

With so many inconsistencies, Bernadette was determined

to find out what, if anything, was true,

even the fact that he'd 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.

In Amsterdam is the beating heart of the world of Van Gogh,

the Van Gogh Museum, founded by his descendants.

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,

and many people are also 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 try to solve them by themselves.

And Bernadette was such a person.

Bernadette has been given access to the museum's own research centre.

Great, great.

Thank you.

She has 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

Paul Signac, who visited Vincent shortly after his injury.

So, it says...

"I saw him the last time in Arles in the spring of 1889.

"He was already at the hospital of the town,

"but the day of my visit he was perfectly OK,

"and he had the famous band round his head, and a fur hat.

"A few days earlier, he'd 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 Signac said in 1921.

An 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 home,

and they said it was half the ear.

So that has always been our point of view.

Was the ear incident a major crisis?

Or was it just a minor event that's been sexed up over time?

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 Arles 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 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 of 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 he ordered his lunch from.

So few of us can imagine the sheer agony of being Vincent van Gogh.

The one person who stuck by him throughout

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 dour 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.

On February 20th, he moved down to Arles,

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 colours.

He had abandoned completely the dreary old greys and browns

of Northern Europe, and here in Southern France

seemed to have discovered an entirely new world.

To us, the landscape around Arles is quintessential Provence.

But in Vincent's mind, it was dazzlingly alien.

But whether it was the rich colours 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, he attacked the canvas.

"I follow no recognised 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 Arles 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?

Bernadette is convinced the answers have to lie

in the town of Arles itself.

She took me to the last place Vincent was seen

the night he cut his ear...

The Rue du Bout d'Arles,

only 100 yards from the Yellow House.

He was seen there at a brothel at about 11.30pm.

Well, this was the heart of the red light district

in Arles in 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 town fathers ignored that, quite happily.

What was it like on the street down here then?

I would imagine a pretty lively place.

This whole street would've been comings and goings

and quite a lot of noise. People were making complaints and saying

the girls were 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, do we?

Well, he and his brother talk 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 went to the brothel,

and Vincent equates it with, you know, having bread and food.

"I've got enough money for this.

"I haven't had a screw for three weeks."

You know, he actually says that.

Vincent frequented many of these brothels, and he painted one,

giving us a sense of the atmosphere.

But on the night of December 23rd, he sought out one in particular.

He crossed over the square...

It's been identified at the end of the street.

And he came directly to this house,

which was the House Of Tolerance, number 1.

That's what, somewhere around here, is it?

It's actually here.

-Where these cars are parked now.

-It was absolutely here

where these cars are parked.

It was bombed by accident in the Second World War.

What do we know about what happened?

He 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.

At 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

in reference. He says, "Take care of this, look after this carefully,

"do this... Keep a souvenir of me, a memory of me."

Do this in remembrance of me?

-That's what I think.

-Yeah.

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 name.

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 madams were recorded in the town census,

with delicate euphemisms for their jobs.

A limonadier 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.

Limonadier... So, I have to look for limonadier,

and I have to look for fille soumise.

A fille soumise 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 filles soumises,

they've got lots of names - Jeanne, Ros, Marguerite, Marie, Madeleine.

But there are no Rachels here whatsoever.

Bernadette spent months trying to get to the bottom of this question.

Why were there no Rachels in the town census?

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 prostitute's name escapes me,

"though her working name was Gaby."

For Bernadette, there came a moment of realisation.

Rachel is a highly unusual name in Arles.

She went back to the records

and found a document listing prostitutes.

Many of the names were followed by the words "dite Rachel"...

"Called Rachel."

It's not their real name.

It's just a 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 in to different girls.

So, maybe...

Although policeman Robert said Gaby was her working name,

maybe he just got it wrong.

Maybe it was her real name.

There were no Rachels living in Arles in 1888,

but there were 31 women called Gabrielle or Gaby.

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-Impressionist...

The notorious Paul Gauguin.

Gauguin was a 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, cos 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 artists' studio or brotherhood.

They lived there in a sort of commune or a medieval guild

or, as he put it, like a band of Japanese Buddhist monks.

And his art dealer brother Theo would feed them and clothe them

and give them canvases and paint,

and the artists would just create.

Vincent spent weeks writing to Gauguin,

persuading him to join him in his utopian idea.

The sunflowers were painted to decorate Gauguin's bedroom.

He bought 12 wicker chairs for the brother artists,

and one ornate chair for Gauguin himself,

whose age and success meant he would be the Father Superior

in their community.

But the real Gauguin couldn't have been more different

to Vincent's monkish ideal.

A canny ex-banker, self-publicist and serial adulterer.

He arrives in Arles, 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 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've got to get out of here.

"I can't possibly take this any longer."

Van Gogh's dream of brotherhood was doomed from the start.

Not only did he and Gauguin have different personalities,

they disagreed about art.

Gauguin liked 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 Gauguin, 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 Gauguin, 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.

All was not well inside the Yellow House.

In Arles, 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 Gaby.

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 Gaby, 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 Gaby who died

around the age of 80 in 1952.

This information completely changes the search

because only one person called Gabrielle died in Arles in 1952.

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 Gaby?

If so, this'll be a sensitive issue,

because her descendants still live just outside Arles.

So I think I've really got to go and see the family now.

It'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.

The family live out of town in a small village.

If they confirm Gaby'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.

So we travelled 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's my great grandmother."

It's a really dark family secret.

Well, 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 story's 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 realise

that she never was.

What was she doing at the brothel then?

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 in to the brothel that night.

But that's no cause for shame, is it?

I mean, she was just a...

She was a femme de menage, a cleaner, or...

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 Gaby a cleaner

at the brothel, she also worked at more than one

of Vincent's favourite haunts on Place 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.

The Kroller-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's state of mind that night.

Marieke, what do we know about this painting?

We know it's one of the first paintings that Van Gogh made

after getting back home when he was in the hospital,

in which he just arranged a still life with onions in the middle,

and a bottle, a coffee pot.

This is a medical book, isn't it?

It's a medical book for home use.

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 stamped 67,

and that's the number of the post office

where his brother went to, near his apartment in Paris.

And then there is a franking mark here,

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 Jo Bonger.

And why would that upset him?

Well, Theo, to him, was his dearest friend.

He supported him emotionally and financially,

he sent him about 100 francs a month.

So he might have been afraid of losing that,

and it might have contributed to his mental breakdown.

On December 21st, 1888,

Vincent's brother Theo became engaged to his fiancee, Johanna.

Van Gogh received the news on December 23rd,

the same day Gauguin 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 Gauguin's betrayal?

Gauguin 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 on the betrayal of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane,

when St Peter the disciple cut off a centurion's ear.

"He was so bizarre that I couldn't take it," Gauguin wrote later.

"He even said to me, 'Are you going to leave?'

"And when I said 'Yes', he tore this sentence from a newspaper

"and put it in my hand.

"It said,

"'The murderer took flight.'"

Horrified, Gauguin left to spend the night in a hotel,

leaving Vincent alone with his demons.

What happened next has remained a complete mystery.

But evidence was to emerge from the last place you'd expect.

In 1956, MGM Pictures released Lust For Life,

starring an Oscar-nominated Kirk Douglas as Vincent van Gogh.

Its 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 Irving Stone, the writer behind the film,

did his research into the ear.

This is a letter that's dated 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 on 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 Signac said..."

And this is from the editorial offices, and it says,

"When Irving Stone, the author of Lust For Life, was in Arles,

"he visited Dr Felix Rey.

"Dr Rey 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 Rey drew a medical diagram for Irving Stone

"which he later signed and which Mr Stone now has in his possession."

It's dated 1955, so what I need to know is...

Is Felix Rey's medical diagram still somewhere?

Felix Rey 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's ear.

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 e-mailing Berkeley's archivist, David Kessler,

trying to track down Felix Rey'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 e-mail in my inbox,

you know, having mailed him all day long,

and he said, in French, "Oh, mon Dieu, je l'ai trouve."

"Oh, my God, I've found it."

Now, finally,

Bernadette is on her way to met the man she's been corresponding with...

..and to see the document he says he's found.

He just had... He discarded stuff as he went along,

so only a very few things exist,

so all of it fits in this box 91 of the collection.

-And in this...

-Wow.

..one of the things I've finally found was 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 godfathers.

And it's from Dr Rey Felix.

I think I'm going to lose it, I'm sorry.

I worked so hard on this.

I can't believe it. I can't believe it after all these years,

I'm so sorry.

It's just a thin little tiny piece of paper here, and so much is...

So eloquent in its own way.

This is from Dr Felix Rey.

I can definitely say that's his signature.

It's dated 18th of August 1930,

and it's unbelievable, it's a before-and-after drawing, you know?

And it says, "I'm 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 will glorify the genius of this remarkable painter.

"Cordially yours, Dr Rey."

And basically it's a 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 really documents that he removed his whole ear.

It must've been an incredibly painful thing to do, and it's...

What was going through his mind at that time must've been remarkable.

Well, I've been working, I think as you know, on this for some time,

and you just... When you finally get to...

..see something...

..you realise

what a really gruesome thing happened.

It brings home the violence of the act.

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 Theo Middendorf

and Louis van Tilborgh

to see if this gains their seal of approval.

Well, this is amazing.

It's quite clear on what happened.

So, only a tiny piece of the lobe...

Yep, remained. There's no ambiguity.

No, extraordinarily enough.

He evidently wanted to make it clear by making two drawings.

-Yeah.

-Mm-hmm.

-So, he didn't want the point to be missed.

-Before and after.

-Yep. I mean...

I couldn't have dreamt of finding anything so crazy, really.

Well, this stands the received wisdom on the head, doesn't it?

It makes it very clear.

I mean, now you've finally got the document of the person who saw him

immediately after it happened.

-And who treated him.

-Who treated him and said that...

Well, that it was a whole ear,

and there's no reason any more to doubt that.

That's the information he got from Rey.

So, he only could have got it from Rey,

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 exhibition.

It's an unprecedented achievement for an amateur researcher.

It was really very thrilling.

Very thrilling. And there's 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 a definitive answer to the question,

I've... My heart was beating.

Not many of us can 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's ear, 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 cut-throat 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 Arles, he was living in Paris...

..and Bernadette has discovered that Gaby, 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 her 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 in Arles 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 Arles.

Three weeks later, Vincent made the same journey.

Cos he goes to Arles very shortly after this, doesn't he?

Yes, very shortly, I mean it's literally...

Did they meet here, and did Vincent follow Gaby 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 Vincent had...

Was always attracted to people who were 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 another of his wounded angels that he wanted to help.

It's a tantalising thought that Gaby could have been the reason

Van Gogh went to Arles 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 Gaby his ear as an act of religious self-sacrifice

and compassion.

Van Gogh would end his own life only 18 months later,

but Gaby lived on until 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 canvas.

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 brilliant but tragic year in Arles 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 artefacts that led to these revelations

are coming together.

The confusing deathbed drawing,

the still-life with his brother's letter,

the portrait he gave as a gift to Felix Rey,

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's ear.