Which of the following is incorrect about this oil painting?
A. The artist of this painting had been treated in an asylum at Saint-Remy, France, on May 7, 1889.
B. The artist had had symptoms of acute mania, epilepsy, hallucination, acute pain, the illness had been suspected variably to be temporal lobe epilepsy precipitated by the use of absinthe, acute intermittent porphyria (AIP), bipolar disorder, neurosyphilis, etc. He eventually died of suicide by shooting himself.
C. It was said that after an argument with a friend and fellow artist Paul Gauguin, he cut off the lobe of his left ear which he put into an envelope and gave to a prostitute named Rachel.
D. This is the third painting in which he used starry backgrounds.
Answer: D
The painting is Café Terrace at Night, also known as The Café Terrace on the Place du Forum. It is an oil painting by the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh on an industrially primed canvas of size 25 (Toile de 25 figure) in Arles, France, mid September 1888. This is the first painting in which he used starry backgrounds. He went on to paint star filled skies in Starry Night Over the Rhone, painted the same month, and the better known Starry Night a year later. Also, in Portrait of Eugene Boch Van Gogh painted a starlight background.
Starry Night Over the Rhone, 1888 (now a collection of Musée d’Orsay, Paris)
Portrait of Eugene Boch, 1888 (a collection of Musée d’Orsay, Paris)
Starry Night, 1889 (now a collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City)
Reference
Dietrich Blumer, M.D. The Illness of Vincent van Gogh. Am J Psychiatry 2002; 159:519–526 (Fulltext link here)