Why did Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear? This compelling detective story reveals the truth about the art world's greatest mystery
Bernadette Murphy was born and brought up in the UK. She has lived in the south of France for most of her adult life and worked in many different fields. A series of chance events led her to start investigating the life of Van Gogh in Arles, but little did she know at the time quite what an exciting adventure it would turn out to be. Van Gogh's Ear is her first book.
This book has the pace of a detective novel, sending fresh blood
pulsing through an old tale as Murphy recreates the heartbreaking
drama of Van Gogh’s loosening grip on reality.
*Daily Mail*
Murphy’s revelations are fascinating and add intriguing details to
the great crisis of Van Gogh’s life.
*The Times*
Murphy’s book rescues the real Van Gogh from the lazy clichés of
tea towel memorabilia by painting an electric, nuanced portrait of
a man who achieved artistic brilliance despite his mental health
issues and not because of them. In doing so, she allows for a
version of his history in which her subject’s passion for life, art
and humanity blooms like the sunflowers he painted.
*Daily Mail*
She knows Provence with an intimacy that’s rare in the ear genre.
Her descriptions of the people, their landscape, their customs are
unusually detailed… Her second stand-out quality is a doggedness
that goes beyond the usual art-historical drives. Relentlessly she
wrestles with the book’s central mystery.
*Sunday Times*
No one before has built up such a detailed picture of the people
who surrounded the great artist.
*Daily Telegraph*
Legend has it that Van Gogh cut off the ear to send to a woman he
loved, surely one of the most ineffective instances of flirting in
cultural history. However, Murphy’s sleuthing allowed her to track
down the girl that Van Gogh gave his ear to, who turned out to be a
cleaner in a brothel. She also found a document drawn up by Dr
Felix Rey, who cared for Van Gogh after the incident, which
confirms that the ear was brutally severed.
*Evening Standard*
It is arguably the best-known story in the history of art: Vincent
van Gogh lops off part of his ear in a moment of insanity and drops
it off at a brothel. The facts behind how the artist mutilated
himself and what happened next can now be told for the first time,
according to experts, after crucial medical evidence was
discovered. Bernadette Murphy, the researcher who discovered the
letter and traced the family of the unknown girl, has now
speculated that Van Gogh could have been offering his own flesh in
a noble but deluded attempt to help heal her.
*Daily Telegraph*
The horror of Vincent van Gogh cutting off his ear in 1888 is one
of the most famous incidents in art history...Now dramatic
discoveries are painting the real story in a new light...When
[Bernadette Murphy] presented her research to experts at the Van
Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, they were astonished.
*Daily Mail*
A recently discovered letter from Félix Rey, the doctor who treated
Van Gogh in the hospital...was found in an American archive by
Bernadette Murphy. The discovery brings an end to a long-standing
biographical question.
*Artlyst*
Bernadette Murphy...discovered a document in an American archive. A
note written by Félix Rey, a doctor who treated van Gogh at the
Arles hospital, contains a drawing of the mangled ear showing that
the artist indeed cut off the whole thing. Murphy...was also able
to identify the woman to whom van Gogh gave his ear.
*New York Times*
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