IX. Was Gauguin capable of attacking his colleague physically?

 

Many contemporates who knew Gauguin affirmed that he was always prepared to fight if he believed he was being attacked, that he lived according to his own rules, that he was ruthless, aggressive and irascible.

He was short-tempered and showed a presumptuous poise, a sly intelligence, and was always watching his back. Some thought that he possessed "butcherbird's killer instincts".* He had even punched his wife Mette in her face.23

Therefore, it is easily conceivable that he didn't hesitate to attack his colleague with his sword that night, either because he felt that he had to defend himself against an attack (perhaps with a razor?), or simply because Van Gogh had become too irritating or intrusive in his personal space.

  

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* Douglas W. Druick/Peter Kort Zegers (eds.): Van Gogh and Gauguin – The Studio of the South; Chicago (Thames & Hudson) 2001, p. 264

23. see Letter of Gauguin's son Emil Gauguin to George Crès, 4 June 1926, quoted in Merlhès 1989, p. 19-20

 

 

a hasty escape

  • Gauguin was eager to leave Arles as fast as possible. The situation had become too hot for him. After having alerted Vincent’s brother Theo by wire, he left for Paris that evening of the same day, 24 December 1888. In his hasty departure, he left behind not only his wounded friend and the Yellow House, but also most of his personal belongings such as studies, sketchbooks, some of his fencing equipment masks and gloves, even his keys
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Vincent van Gogh and the series La Berceuse, Arles 1888–1889.

The period that Vincent van Gogh spent in Arles and Saint-Rémy from 1888 to 1890 undoubtedly belongs to the most creative phase of his artistic career. The existence of the almost identical paintings of Madame Augustine Roulin, the wife of the Arles postmaster, is consequently all the more surprising.
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The Corpus Delicti Is a Corpuscle

  • It can be said that with the exception of the sister-in-law Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, who had family-related reasons for playing down the injury, not a single witness speaks of a severed earlobe. On the contrary, the mutually independent statements by the principal witness Paul Gauguin, the prostitute who was given the ear, the gendarme who was on duty in the red-light district, the investigating police officer and the local newspaper report, accord with the evidence that the artist’s unfortunate “self-mutilation” involves the entire (left) ear.
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