Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear

The bandage

Start with the bandage, because everyone does. On the night of 23 December 1888, after a quarrel with Gauguin, Van Gogh cut off most of his left ear with a razor, wrapped it in paper and took it to a woman at a brothel near the Yellow House. He was found in his bed the next morning and taken to the hospital. Two weeks later he was home, and within days of that he had set up a mirror and painted this.

Because he painted himself in a mirror, the bandage is on the right ear in the picture and the wound was on the left. He does not dramatise it. It is a clean white shape, tied under the chin, painted as carefully as the fur on the cap, and the face above it is calm. That is the shock of the painting: not the injury but the composure.

The face

The eyes are green and look off to the left, past you, with the brow drawn down; the mouth is closed and the cheeks are hollow. He is thirty-five and looks fifty. The skin is painted in strokes of yellow, orange and green, laid side by side and left, and the whole face is built from the same short bars of colour as the wall behind it. He was thinner than in the summer portraits; the hospital had not fed him much.

The cap is a winter cap with a fur brim, blue and black, and the coat is a heavy green overcoat with the collar up. It was January and the Yellow House had no proper heating. The clothes tell you the room was cold, and that he was painting anyway.

The print

Behind his right shoulder a Japanese print is pinned to the wall: two women in a landscape with a mountain, a cheap woodblock of the kind he and Theo had collected by the hundred in Paris. It is the only picture in the room, and it is there on purpose. Japan was the reason he had come south. He had written that in Arles he felt he was in Japan, that the light and the colour were what the printmakers had seen, and that a painter should live like a Japanese monk, simply, close to nature. The print is the dream. The bandage is what it cost.

The easel

At the left edge stands an easel with a canvas on it, and the canvas is blank. That is the sentence the painting is making. Two weeks after the worst night of his life, with his head bandaged, he has put a new canvas up and is about to begin. He wrote to Theo from the hospital that he would go back to work, and this is the proof.

I hope I have just simply had an artist's fit.

Vincent van Gogh, letter to Theo, about 7 January 1889, our translation

He painted a second version the same month, with a pipe in his mouth and a red background, which is in a private collection. This one, without the pipe, is the one that has come to stand for the whole story: the painter, the wound, the print, the empty canvas.

What does the Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear mean?

It is a man telling you he is all right, and you are meant to believe him and not quite manage it. The composure is real: he did go back to work, and the next eighteen months, in Arles and then in the asylum at Saint-Rémy, were the most productive of his life, with The Starry Night among them. The fear is real too, and it is in the eyes.

What it is not is a painting about madness. Van Gogh painted it to show Theo, who was paying for everything, that the investment was safe, and to show himself the same thing. It is the most famous self-portrait of the modern age because it is also the most honest one about what work is for.

The Starry NightVan Gogh, 1889Café Terrace at NightVan Gogh, 1888Starry Night Over the RhôneVan Gogh, 1888

Where is the original?

In the Courtauld Gallery at Somerset House in London, which the textile magnate Samuel Courtauld bought it for in 1928, in the same rooms as Manet's Bar at the Folies-Bergère and Cézanne's card players. It is oil on canvas, 60 by 49 centimetres, and it hangs at eye level, which is where it belongs.

People order it for studies and studios, and a surprising number for the room where they work. Our hand-painted reproduction of the Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear is painted in oil on canvas from the Courtauld original, in the same short strokes. More in our guide to Van Gogh.