Van Gogh scholar Martin Baileyclaims the distressed Dutch artist slashed his own left ear lobe afterlearning that his more affluent art dealer brother, Theo, was gettingmarried, contesting theories that fellow painter Paul Gauguin was to blame.

Bailey’s theory comes from his examination of a letter found in Still Life with a Plate of Onions (1889), apainting that the artist completed shortly after his ear was mutilated.He says a letter written by Theo from Paris in December 1888 announcinghis plans to marry triggered the already volatile artist’sself-afflicted injury.

Theo served as his brother’s longtime financial and emotional crutch.

“Vincent was fearful that he might lose his brother’s emotionaland financial support,” Bailey, author of the 1995 book Van Gogh:Letters From Provence, writes in the ArtNewspaper.

Earlier this year, two German art historians claimed that Gauguinlopped off van Gogh’s ear over a heated argument, and that both artiststried to cover up the accident to avoid prosecution.

In their book, Van Gogh’s Ear: Paul Gauguin and the Pact of Silence, Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegans argue that van Gogh’s shock from the sword attack eventually led him to suicide two years later.

As in the traditional account, Kaufmann and Wildegans describe vanGogh delivering his ear to a prostitute at a nearby bordello, and thengoing home, where police found him the next day.

Van Gogh’s ear has stoked many heated debates among scholars andart historians. Some have blamed his mental illness; others have saidhe was driven mad by lead in his paints.

Scholars at Hamburg University have suggested that Gauguin, withwhom van Gogh shared a house at Arles in the south of France, slicedthe ear in a spat over a prostitute called Rachel.