On this day in 1888, Vincent Van Gogh suffered a mental breakdown in Aires, France. After allegedly threatening fellow painter Paul Gauguin, he sliced off his left ear with a razor and delivered it to a young cleaning woman at a local brothel. Van Gogh would spend the next 18 months in and out of mental hospitals before suffering a mysterious and fatal gunshot wound to the abdomen on July 28, 1890. He was at the height of his creative productivity.
