• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, December 13, 2016

Until this new episode of the PBS series “Secrets of the Dead” came along, the story of Vincent van Gogh’s severed ear didn’t seem all that mysterious.

The popular version of the story is this: He was mentally ill and despondent, reportedly over a woman. Then, one evening in 1888 in Arles, France, he audaciously sliced off his right ear (either whole or in part), wrapped it in a cloth, walked to a neighborhood brothel and presented it to a prostitute he knew.

While this version of the story is true in its broad strokes, the details of this gruesome act, van Gogh’s motivation for doing it, how much of his ear he actually cut off, and the identity of the person he gave the ear to afterward have been shrouded in mystery, according to this show, subtitled “Van Gogh’s Ear” and premiering Wednesday night (December 14) on PBS.

The show follows an amateur sleuth, a British-born woman named Bernadette Murphy who has lived in France for 30 years. She has been researching the van Gogh ear story for seven years. She is not an art historian, but more of a van Gogh enthusiast and hobbyist.

In this one-hour show, we watch as she strolls around Arles, visits various archives in Arles and Paris, travels to the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and even ventures as far as the University of California at Berkeley.

There, she gains access to the personal papers bestowed to the university by author Irving Stone, who wrote -- among other works -- the novel “Lust for Life” about van Gogh’s life in Arles. The novel was published in 1934 and was famously made into a movie released in 1956 with Kirk Douglas as van Gogh.

Apparently, Stone conducted very thorough research for this book. Inside the file box where Stone organized his “Lust for Life” materials, Murphy stumbles on a document that seems to answer a key question that the show insists has eluded researchers for decades.

The document seems to show conclusively exactly how much of his ear van Gogh sliced off. The document is portrayed in the show as the Holy Grail of Murphy’s research. But there it was, hiding in plain sight. And it’s reasonable to assume that others must have known it was there, starting with Irving Stone himself, who died in 1989.

However, if Murphy was the first one in decades to “discover” this artifact, then more power to her. She’s a plucky lady who showed the “real” van Gogh scholars a thing or two about dogged research.

She goes on to uncover similar facts about the young woman van Gogh gave the ear to, and more details about the upheavals in van Gogh’s life in the days preceding the incident that might have led him to commit this grisly act of self-mutilation.

From the French countryside around Arles to the streets of Amsterdam and Paris, this show is a visual treat. Best of all is the attention paid to van Gogh’s work, dozens of paintings seen from afar and close-up, capturing the intensity of his brushstrokes.

It’s all fascinating, poignant stuff -- well told, well-filmed, and well worth watching.

“Secrets of the Dead: Van Gogh’s Ear” airs Wednesday (Dec. 14) at 10 p.m. Eastern on PBS.