There are many different stories about just how Vincent Van Gogh went insane and cut his ear off in the process. A lot of them seem to put Van Gogh to be the one blame because he either had a mental breakdown and chased a friend or he was doing it as proof of his love for someone. While researching online I came apron an article “Starry Night: Meaning of the Vincent Van Gogh Landscape Painting” speaking of his famous art work The Starry Night, the article touched very lightly on the topic , but I found it interesting because it states how famous that particular story is. The author states “The story of Van Gogh cutting off his ear after a fight with his friend, the French artist Paul Gauguin, is one of the most popular anecdotes in art history, and supposedly occurred in winter 1888, the year before the painting of Starry Night and not long before Van Gogh’s death in 1890.”(K Shabi). As true as that statement is I believe that it’s silly to claim that the fight story is how Van Gogh cut his ear off, instead I think they should have elaborated on the many different ways it supposedly happened. A couple different stories are that Paul and Van Gogh who were known to be roommates were fencing one day and in a freak accident Paul accidentally cut of Vincent’s ear “lobe”they concoct the story that Vincent did it to himself to save Paul the humiliation of an arrest. In another move known story, Vincent falls in to one of his manic attacks and goes after Paul with a razor blade, Paul escapes and somewhere along the lines Van Gogh cuts his whole ear off and leaves to hand it to the owner of the brothel that he frequents . As interesting as K Shabi’ quote I think it lacks important information of such a famous event, with so many different speculative stories I think they could have expanded fleshed out and taught the readers about just how unstable Vincent was by the stories.
https://legomenon.com/starry-night-meaning-of-vincent-van-gogh-painting.html
