text: It is the most famous act of self-mutilation in the history of art, but the exact motivation – love? Jealousy? Rage? – for Vincent van Gogh’s decision to cut off his ear has remained unknown for more than a century. 
   
   According to a new study of his time in Provence, the gruesome procedure was in fact inspired by the news his brother Theo, his most loyal confidant and financial supporter, was about to marry after a whirlwind romance. The research throws doubt on the popular theory that Van Gogh took a razor to his ear after a passionate row with fellow artist Paul Gauguin. 
   
   It was known that Van Gogh was distressed by news of the marriage – which could have threatened the closeness of their relationship, and also left Theo with a wife and family to support, unable to fund a struggling brother who had yet to sell a single canvas – but it had been thought that he learned of it only after the incident. 
   
   However, the writer Martin Bailey, for his new book Studio of the South, has uncovered evidence that Van Gogh almost certainly learned of it in a letter from Theo delivered on Sunday 23 December 1888. 
   
   Later that night there was indeed a quarrel, after the two artists had spent the day working penned up together by continuous rain, and Gauguin would leave the house threatening to return to Paris – but the trigger for Van Gogh’s despair was not that, but the news from his brother, Bailey believes. 
   
   Theo’s letter enclosed 100 francs, but also the news that only a fortnight earlier he had met an old friend, Jo Bonger, who had previously turned him down. This time, within a week, she had agreed to marry him. 
   
   Bailey has established that Theo had already written to his mother asking permission to marry, and that Jo had written to her older brother, who responded with a telegram of congratulations that arrived on 23 December. Bailey is sure that Theo would have written to his brother at the same time, and that the news was in the letter that was delivered to the famous Yellow House at Arles, also on the 23rd. 
   
   The razor slash left Van Gogh bleeding copiously, but he wrapped the piece of ear in paper and walked to his favourite brothel, where he gave it to a young woman he knew. Another recent book, by Bernadette Murphy, suggested that this was not a prostitute, but a local farmer’s daughter working there as a servant. Murphy also uncovered a drawing, made by a doctor long after the event, suggesting that Van Gogh had cut the entire ear off, and not just the lobe. In any event, the poor woman opened the parcel, fainted on the spot, Van Gogh fled, and the police were called. 
   
   Gauguin returned to the house the following morning, Christmas Eve, where he found the police on the doorstep, and the artist lying in his blood-soaked bed. Theo, who had been hoping to spend a first Christmas with his fiancee, arrived on Christmas Day to visit his brother in hospital. Van Gogh – after briefly being locked in an isolation room – was discharged on 7 January, and wrote to Theo: “Soon the fine days will come and I’ll start on the orchards in blossom again.” Despite a further collapse and another spell in hospital, he continued to paint until he left Arles in April. 
   
   The paintings from this desperate period in his life are among his best loved, and Bailey has also traced the surprising afterlife of the bed in his famous The Bedroom. It was one of two double beds bought when he was furnishing the rented house to welcome Gauguin, and Bailey touchingly suggests: “The twin pillows in the painting suggest that he still had a lingering hope that he might eventually share his bed with a woman.” 
   
   In 1890, Van Gogh had the bed sent by rail to Auvers, north of Paris, where he created the last works before his suicide in July. Theo died the following year, and his widow inherited the bed and used it in a small guesthouse she ran in the Netherlands. There was talk of returning it to a museum in the Yellow House, but the building was destroyed in the second world war, and the bed was instead donated by his nephew to an appeal for furniture to help villagers whose homes had been destroyed. Bailey has been unable to trace it further, but speculates that the sturdy wooden bed could still be out there somewhere, unrecognised. 
   
   
   
   Van Gogh is now one of the best known artists in the world, but it is a measure of how obscure he was in the 1880s that of the four contemporary newspaper accounts of the ear mutilation that Bailey has traced, two spelled his name wrong, and a third, which reported that he was “suffering cruelly” from the injury, described him as Polish – “peintre de nationalité polonaise”. 
   
   
   
   • Studio of the South: Van Gogh in Provence is published by Frances Lincoln, price £25, on November 3. ||||| How I followed the paper trail 
   
   In 1945 Van Gogh’s bed formed part of a donation to a Netherlands community (© Courtesy of NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Netherlands) 
   
   Vincent van Gogh’s painting of his bedroom gives a deep insight into his personal life in Arles in Provence, where he accomplished his greatest work. The actual bed depicted in the celebrated work survived until after the Second World War, we can reveal. In 1945, a descendant donated the bed to a community near Arnhem that suffered during the liberation of the Netherlands.Van Gogh bought the bed (and another for a guest) in September 1888, just before Gauguin arrived to stay with him at the Yellow House. Each bed cost 150 francs, a very large sum equivalent to ten months’ rent. The fact it was a double bed suggests that Van Gogh had a lingering hope that he might eventually share it with a woman. Ensconced in the first comfortable home of his own as an adult, he proudly completed a picture of his newly furnished bedroom. “The most beautiful paintings are those one dreams of while smoking a pipe in one’s bed,” he wrote. It was there that he conceived some of his finest works.Gauguin arrived a month after the beds but his stay was abruptly curtailed by the events of 23 December. It was to his bed that the bleeding Van Gogh returned after his notorious self-mutilation and visit to a local brothel where he delivered part of his ear to a girl. From then on he only spent a few nights at home, being mainly confined to the Arles hospital.He had thought of taking his bed to the asylum in Saint-Rémy, where he retreated in May 1889 but instead left it in Arles, and in 1890 had it “flat-packed” and sent by rail to Auvers-sur-Oise, north of Paris, where he worked for the last weeks of his life. While in Auvers, he wrote to his brother, saying that, like painted portraits, “pieces of furniture one knows… recall memories for a long time”. On 27 July 1890 he shot himself in the wheat fields above the village, dying two days later.Vincent’s brother Theo, who inherited his estate, died of syphilis six months later, and the bed then passed to his widow, Jo. She immediately moved back to Holland, where she set up a small guest house. Van Gogh’s bed came, too, since it would prove useful for the lodgers. Jo died in 1925, and the bed then passed to her son, also called Vincent, who was living in the village of Laren, east of Amsterdam.While working in the archives of the Van Gogh Museum I found an unpublished reference to the bed. In 1937 there were plans to turn the Yellow House into a small museum, and Fernand Benoît, the curator of the Arles museum who championed the idea, wrote to Vincent van Gogh, the artist’s nephew who received Jo’s inheritance, to ask to borrow paintings. Vincent replied positively, adding that “I could give you the bed which appears in the painting of the bedroom”. This letter, written on flimsy paper, which has partly disintegrated, provided the first evidence that the bed had survived. The Yellow House was never turned into a museum. The building was later hit by Allied bombs in 1944 and then demolished.My next step was to contact the son of Van Gogh’s nephew, Johan van Gogh, then aged 93. I visited him at his home outside The Hague in 2015. He remembered the bed in store in his family’s cellar and recalled what had happened in 1945. That year his father had donated the bed to victims of the war who lived “somewhere in the Arnhem area” in the eastern Netherlands.Teun Koetsier, a historian in the town of Laren and author of a book on the Second World War, provided me with further information. In September 1945, the citizens of Laren had collected several truckloads of furniture to donate to Boxmeer, a small town 40km south of Arnhem. Photographs of the lorries arriving in Boxmeer survive.The needy Boxmeer recipient of Van Gogh’s bed would have had no idea of its famous provenance. It would have been nearly 60 years old and its new owner may well have replaced it some years later, when life became easier. But there remains the intriguing possibility that the bed still survives in Boxmeer—a silent witness to the story of Van Gogh in Arles.
target: – Vincent Van Gogh may have cut off his own ear in response to what most people would consider happy news, according to a writer who has taken a fresh look at one of history's famous self-mutilations. Martin Bailey says Van Gogh didn't take a razor to his ear because of an argument with fellow artist Paul Gauguin, though the two did quarrel that day in 1888, the Guardian reports. Instead, Van Gogh cut his ear off because he had learned that his brother, Theo, was going to get married, Bailey says. He says the struggling artist feared that the marriage would end his close relationship with his brother—and that it would cause Theo to cut off the financial support Van Gogh relied on. Bailey says that Van Gogh didn't learn of the engagement while he was recovering in hospital, as previously thought, but in a letter that was delivered to him in Provence just hours before the self-mutilation. "Had Van Gogh been elated by the engagement, it is virtually inconceivable that he would have sliced off part of his ear a few hours after receiving Theo’s news, whatever other difficulties he was facing," Bailey writes in new book Studio of the South, per the Telegraph. Bailey, writing in the Art Newspaper, says his research into Van Gogh's years in Provence has also yielded clues to the whereabouts of Van Gogh's famous bed. He believes it was donated to needy people in a small Dutch town months after the end of World War II. (This museum grew an ear from Van Gogh DNA.)