How To Address A Letter Going To The Netherlands

(poignant music) - five or six years ago,a researcher in france, an english woman who livesin the south of france, found a reference to adocument in the papers here at bancroft, andcontacted a colleague of mine

How To Address A Letter Going To The Netherlands, to see if he could find this document relating to vincent van gogh. this is one of severalhundred boxes that make up the papers of irving stone

that are held here atthe bancroft library. this box contains the research notes and draft documents ofhis book lust for life, which documents the lifeof the artist van gogh. here you can see an example of the material that he gathered, notes, printed documentsrelating to van gogh. but hidden in this folder wasthis very special document, here which ends decades dispute about

how much of van gogh'sear he actually cut off. this was a documentwritten at stone's request by the doctor who treatedvan gogh after the incident. and the doctor you can see drew these diagrams illustratingthrough this dotted line how much of the ear wasremoved by van gogh's razor. and as you can see, the, pretty much all of the ear was removed, with just a little bitof the lobe remaining.

well the note is sosmall and unassuming, it'd be easy to miss it if you are looking through the archive, even though it is so important. it is also curious thatit was done i think 42 years after the incident itself, so the doctor clearly hada strong memory of it. he hoped irving stone wouldwrite favorably of van gogh who he respected as an artistic genius.

normally this is notframed but it is framed now for an exhibition in amsterdam. when it returns it willbe removed from the frame and put back in this folder, and back on the shelf at bancroft. discoveries on this leveldon't happen very often in any archive in the world. this was a, you know, major document that would change the storyof van gogh's life forever.