Who Got Van Gogh’s Ear? The Name Revealed After 130 Years: Gabrielle
Arles, southern France, the night of 23 December 1888. Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear with a razor, wrapped it in paper and walked to the brothel.
He handed the package to a young woman at the door and, it is said, told her to keep it carefully.
For nearly 130 years she remained a nameless “girl from the brothel”. In 2016 a researcher found her name.
Not the Lobe, the Whole Ear
That evening Van Gogh had a furious row with Gauguin, who was staying with him. Gauguin left Arles the next day, Christmas Day, and Van Gogh was taken to hospital.
For a long time the accepted story was that he had cut off only part of his earlobe. Bernadette Murphy, a British-born art history teacher living near Arles, could not let it go. She combed through the records of some 15,000 people who lived in Arles at the time.
Then, in a library in the United States, she found a sketch drawn by Félix Rey, the doctor who treated Van Gogh. He had cut off almost the entire ear.
The Girl Who Survived Rabies
Murphy also found the name of the woman who received the ear, but promised her descendants to keep the surname out of her 2016 book Van Gogh’s Ear. A week after publication, The Art Newspaper followed the book’s clues and confirmed the name in the records of the Institut Pasteur in Paris.
Gabrielle Berlatier, a farmer’s daughter from a village about ten kilometres from Arles. On 8 January 1888 the 18-year-old was bitten by a rabid dog and was taken to Paris, where Pasteur’s new vaccine saved her life.
The treatment left her family in debt, and she worked cleaning and doing odd jobs at the brothel in Arles. According to Murphy, she was too young to be a registered prostitute.
The One Who Kept the Secret
A café near where Gabrielle worked was run by friends of Van Gogh, which suggests he may already have known her. If he had seen the scar from her rabies treatment, he was handing his own wound to someone who had been wounded.
Gabrielle hardly ever spoke of that night, and her descendants long preferred her name to stay private. Van Gogh’s Yellow House was destroyed by bombing in 1944. What remembers that night now are paintings and records.
The Van Gogh Ear Incident
- Date: 23 December 1888, Arles, France
- Recipient: Gabrielle Berlatier (about 18 at the time)
- How it came to light: Bernadette Murphy, Van Gogh’s Ear (2016), and The Art Newspaper’s follow-up
- Related work: Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear (1889, Courtauld Gallery)
Sources: The Art Newspaper, The Guardian, Artsy, Artnet, Van Gogh Museum
Photos: Vincent van Gogh, Public domain / Peter Broster, CC BY 3.0 / Internet Archive Book Images, No restrictions (Wikimedia Commons)