Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear 2

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Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear 2: Vincent van Gogh

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Vincent van Gogh Oil Painting - Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear 2

Keywords: Self, Portrait, Bandaged, Ear

Work Overview: Artist Vincent van Gogh
Year January 1889
Medium oil on canvas
Dimensions 60 cm × 49 cm (24 in × 19 in)
Location Courtauld Gallery

Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear is a 1889 self-portrait by Dutch, Post-Impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh.
In this self-portrait, Van Gogh is shown wearing a blue cap with black fur and a green overcoat, with a bandage covering his ear and extending under his chin. He is in a traditional three-quarter view, and his forward gaze falls slightly to the right, out of the frame. Behind him is an open window, assumedly letting in a winter breeze, a canvas on an easel, with a few indistinguishable marks, as well as a Japanese woodblock print. This woodblock print has been identified as a Geishas in a Landscape published by Sato Tokyo. This shows an important influence of Japonism and wood block print on Van Gogh’s work, which also appear in the background of other portraits he had created.[2] The painting is composed of impasto strokes, mostly in a vertical pattern. This creates a texture, which comes up off the canvas and adds dimension to the flat surface. The skin tone is muted with green and yellowish tones. The bandage covering Van Gogh’s ear in this painting alludes to his most famous conflict. Van Gogh used a mirror for his self-portraits which is why some mistakenly think that he lost part of his right ear instead of his left.

Van Gogh moved from Paris to Arles in hopes of creating a community for artists to exist in mutual supportiveness and encouragement. He invited Paul Gauguin, an artist whom he had befriended in Paris, to come stay with him. They proved to be a disagreeable pair and quarreled often, sometimes violently. The evening of December 23, 1888 during one of their arguments, Van Gogh had a seizure during which he threatened Gauguin with a razor, but then injured himself, severing part of his left ear. In a state of excitement, he then brought the dismembered lobe to the Maison de Tolérance bordello where he presented it to a prostitute named Rachel. When Gauguin returned the following morning he discovered that the police had arrived at the house, and blood was splattered in every room. Van Gogh had severed an artery in his neck, and was in grave health after losing so much blood. He was removed to the hospital, and he confessed to having no recollection of what happened during this fit. Throughout his life, Van Gogh continued to suffer from similar fits, sometimes characterized by acute paranoia.

At the time of Van Gogh’s death, this painting was in the possession of Julien (Père) Tanguy, although it was unclear how he had obtained it. Tanguy had posed twice for Van Gogh in 1887. It was exhibited in Paris 1901 and 1905 in a major Van Gogh retrospective. In 1928 Samuel Courtauld purchased it. It is currently located in The Courtauld Gallery in London, UK.[4]

Some critics dismiss this painting as a fake or crude pastiche. However, if this were true it would have been painted at a moment in the 1890s when it wouldn’t have been profitable, as the artist would have died only a few years earlier and had only sold a handful of works in his lifetime. By January 17, 1889 Vincent had written to his brother Theo mentioning he had completed “another new self portrait.” Confusion has arisen over whether this was in reference to Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear, or Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe.[2] In each of these portraits Van Gogh is wearing the same clothing and sitting in the same pose, although the color schemes, props and locations are different. The Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe has become more widely accepted in academia as one of Van Gogh’s authentic paintings.

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Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear

1889

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)

Oil on canvas

Width: 50 cm ( canvas ); Height: 60.5 cm ( canvas ); Width: 70 cm ( frame ); Height: 81 cm ( frame ); Depth: 8 cm ( frame );

Acquisition (source, method, date)
Courtauld, Samuel; bequest; 1948
P.1948.SC.175

About this work
Paul Gauguin joined Van Gogh in Arles in November 1888, in order to paint together in what Van Gogh called the ‘studio of the south’, but they quickly started to quarrel. After an argument on 23 December, Van Gogh mutilated his right ear. He was admitted to hospital, and Gauguin returned to Paris.

This self-portrait was one of the first works Van Gogh painted after this incident. He seems to have thought that the act of painting would help him recover his mental equilibrium.

Van Gogh wears rough outdoor clothing. Behind him are an easel with a scarcely worked painting, and a print he owned by the Japanese artist Sato Torakiyo (dating from the 1870s). The picture could be a defiant statement of his determination to continue painting (Permanent collection label)

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The unfortunate man
The following report appeared in the Arles journal Le Forum Republicain on December 30, 1888:
Last Sunday, at 11:30 in the evening, Vincent Vaugogh [sic], a painter of Dutch origin, called at the Brothel No. 1, asked for a woman called Rachel and handed her … his ear, saying: 'Guard this object with your life'. Then he disappeared. When informed of the action, which could only be that of a pitiful madman, the police went the next day to his house and discovered him lying on his bed apparently at the point of death. The unfortunate man has been rushed to hospital.
Accounts of what took place that night vary. Whatever the exact circumstances, though, whatever underlying motivations could have compelled van Gogh to do it, the episode effectively put an end to one of the most famous working relationships in the history of art, as Paul Gauguin boarded the train to Paris the next day.
For nine weeks they had lived together sharing lodgings in the Yellow House, just outside the old town walls of Arles in the South of France, spurring each other on as collaborators and as rivals too. The dream had been to set up “a studio in the South,” as van Gogh put it, a community of artists, with himself and Gauguin, the founding fathers, all working in harmony with nature and, as he hoped, with each other.
A brave face?
The painting, completed two weeks after the event, is often read as a farewell to that dream. For Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, the most recent biographers of the artist, however, the portrait was first and foremost a plea to van Gogh’s doctors.

It shows the artist in three-quarter profile standing in a room in the Yellow House wearing a closed coat and a fur cap. His right ear is bandaged. It was in fact his left ear that was bandaged, the painting being a mirror image. To his right is an easel with a canvas on it. Barely visible, a faint outline underneath reveals what looks to be a still-life which appears to have been painted over. The top of the easel has been cropped by the edge of the canvas and the sitter's hat so as to form a fork-like shape. To his left is a blue framed window, and partly obscured by the gaunt ridge of his cheek, a Japanese woodblock print shows two geishas in a landscape with Mount Fuji in the background.
Naifeh and White Smith argue that van Gogh, following his release from hospital, was anxious to persuade his doctors that he was indeed perfectly fit and able to take care of himself and that, despite his momentary lapse, it would not be necessary for them to have him committed, as had been suggested, to one of the local insane asylums; hence the winter coat and hat, to keep warm as they had advised, and with the window ajar still getting that much-needed fresh air into his system. The bandage too, which would have been soaked in camphor, suggests that he both accepts what has happened and is happy, literally, to take his medicine. The same note of stoic optimism, if one wishes to read the painting this way, is also found in the letters to his brother Theo, in which van Gogh, far from abandoning his dream of a "studio in the South," talks of continuing the project, expressing the desire for more artists to come to Arles, even proposing that Gauguin and he could “start afresh.”
Yet, of course, whether or not van Gogh was willing to admit to it, the project had most definitely reached its end. And though for a short time he did get to carry on living in the Yellow House, within a few weeks, acting on a petition handed in to the local authorities and signed by 30 of his neighbours, he was forcefully removed and taken to Arles Hospital where he was locked in an isolation cell. In May van Gogh committed himself to the private asylum in Saint-Remy a small town north of Arles and in a little over a year he was dead.

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