How did Vincent van Gogh really die? We’ve all heard of the tortured artist who took his own life before he had a chance to see the true adoration for this work. The famous artist died from a shot to the abdomen on July 27, 1980, under suspicious circumstances. Some people believe there is a darker truth to the suicide story. What if he was murdered by a local boy who was known to carry a faulty gun and loved to terrorize the artist?
The Legacy of Vincent Van Gogh
Vincent Van Gogh is widely admired and loved for being an unconventional artist who transformed into one of the most influential figures in Western history because of his Post-Impressionist art. In his artistic career, which spanned only a decade, he created approximately 2,100 artworks. He painted landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and self-portraits.
His work was characterized by textured brushstrokes and bold colors that expressed a connection to nature and human emotion. His most famous works, such as Starry Night and the Sunflowers series, are revered in history for their emotional depth and the artists’ ability to capture the complexities of human nature.
Van Gogh’s Mental Health
The onset of Van Gogh’s severe mental health distress began around 1888, after a feud with fellow artist Paul Gauguin, who was staying with the artist at the time. Their tumultuous friendship is said to be the cause of the infamous ear mutilation, though we have very little information about this incident. All we know is that after an altercation with Gauguin, Van Gogh returned to his room, where he began to hear voices and partially severed his left earlobe with a razor.
After bandaging the wound, he delivered the piece of ear to a woman at a brothel he frequented. He was then found unconscious by police and taken to a hospital. The artist had no recollection of the event, and it has been suggested he suffered from an acute mental breakdown. At the time, his diagnosis was called “acute mania with generalized delirium.”
The police ordered him to be placed in hospital care, and Gauguin used the opportunity to flee Arles, where the two artists were living at the time. By the beginning of 1889, Van Gogh had returned home, though he still suffered from hallucinations and delusions of poisoning. He returned to the hospital after a petition by 30 townspeople that described him as the “redheaded madman.”
Two months later, Van Gogh voluntarily entered an asylum in Saint-Remy-de-Provence, writing around this time: “Sometimes moods of indistinguishable anguish, sometimes moments when the veil of time and fatality of circumstances seemed to be torn apart for an instant.” The clinic and its gardens became a source of inspiration for the artist and can be seen throughout his studies and paintings. Between February and April of 1890, Van Gogh suffered a relapse. It was severe, and he was unable to write and barely able to draw and paint. By May, he was able to leave the clinic and move to a Parisian suburb close to his doctor, Dr Paul Gachet, and brother, Theo.
At this time, the artist reminisced about memories of the North, which is reflected in much of his work. He also became captivated by the vast wheatfields, which, he wrote, represented his sadness and extreme loneliness. His work became melancholic and sad.
Van Gogh’s Suicide
On July 27, 1890, Vincent van Gogh returned to his inn with a bullet wound in his chest. The innkeeper, concerned, assisted the artist, and soon doctors arrived. It was noted at the time that the bullet passed through his chest, missing all organs, was deflected by a rib, and possibly stopped around his spine. The next morning, his brother arrived and recorded that Van Gogh was in good spirits, though within hours, he began suffering from a severe infection, and he died the next morning. Theo wrote down Vincent’s last words: “The sadness will last forever.”
We know little else about the time before the artist arrived back at the inn: where he was, what he was doing, and, most importantly, what had happened. The most common belief is that he had been at the wheatfields painting, though no supplies were ever found at the location, and that he did not return home with them. Some people have questioned the validity of Vincent van Gogh’s suicide, with one of the biggest questions being: Who shoots themselves in the midsection and then walks a mile home instead of finishing the job?
Various Theories
People who believe that the suicide story is fake focus on several points. First, if Vincent van Gogh did commit suicide, a note was never found. There was a scrap piece of paper found in his clothing, but it was a draft of a letter he was writing to his brother explaining his excitement for the future. Second, no early accounts of the events nor the reports mention suicide. The accounts written in the days immediately after the incident note that the artist simply wounded himself. Third, we have no evidence of where he was when the shooting occurred—no one in the town is said to have seen him despite the summer crowd being busy. This means he may not have been at the wheatfield at all.
Despite the lack of evidence, the suicide theory spread like wildfire, and Vincent van Gogh became known as the tortured artist. Adeline Ravoux, the Innkeeper’s daughter, stayed quiet about her side of the story until 1953. At that point, she began recounting stories that her father told her. However, they would constantly change, becoming more dramatic with each telling. Due to this ever-changing narrative, her stories are difficult to recount and take seriously.
Another testimony came from the son of Paul Gachet, the artist’s homeopath at the time of the shooting. The son was 17 at the time, and he spent his life inflating his family’s connection with Van Gogh. It is suspected that he and his father stole paintings from the artists’ room in the days following the incident, and their stories helped raise the value of these possessions. Theo’s son, Vincent, dismissed Gachet’s son, calling him highly unreliable.
So, if Vincent van Gogh didn’t shoot himself, who did? In the 1930s, scholar John Rewald visited Auvers, noting a rumor that René Secrétan had accidentally shot Vincent van Gogh and that the artist chose to protect the boy as an act of martyrdom. But who was René Secrétan, you may ask? He was a 16-year-old boy whose bourgeois family spent their summer in Auvers. Secrétan molded himself after a character he saw in a Wild West show: he was known to wear fringed buckskin, a cowboy hat, chaps, and accessorize with a small-caliber pistol known for misfiring.
Before Secrétan came to town that summer, Van Gogh was already ridiculed by the townspeople. Not only was his ear disfigured, but he was also an alcoholic known for arguing and having no friends. Allegedly, Secrétan would mock and play pranks on the artist to make his friends laugh. After cozying up the man by buying him drinks and sharing his pornography, Secrétan began pulling pranks on him, ranging from simply putting salt in his tea to putting a snake in his box of paints.
Secrétan grew up and became a respected banker and businessman in Paris, never making a statement about his involvement other than admitting to giving the artist his gun, stating that it was fate the gun happened to work that day. According to Secrétan, he had already left for the season before Van Gogh was shot.
Vincent Van Gogh’s Injuries
Van Tilborough and Meendendorp completed a forensic report of the artist’s injury relying on a report from Paul Gache Jr, despite Paul Jr having never seen the wound. He described a brown and purple halo surrounding the wound, which they interpreted as such: the purple halo indicates a close gun range, and the brown halo would have been powder burns from the proximity of the gun to the skin. In their report, they assert Van Gogh’s shirt must have been lifted, with the gun against his bare skin.
However, in an investigation undertaken by Smith and Naifeh through Dr Maio, these findings were categorized as wrong. According to Dr Maio, the purple halo was nothing to note, and the brown halo simply indicated the entrance of a wound. After undertaking his own inquiry, given the information about the wound, Dr Maio stated that it would have been extremely difficult to shoot oneself in this location [the left side] with the left hand. On top of this, Dr Maio noted that whoever fired the gun would have powder burns on their hands. In all of the original records of Van Gogh’s injuries, there is no note of any burns. Dr Maio also believed that if the gun had been directly placed on the skin, there would have been obvious burns at the entrance, which were never described in the reports. The conclusion Dr Maio came to was that Van Gogh did not shoot himself.
In another study by Arenberg, Maio, and Baden in 2020, where the same model of revolved was tested at direct contact with, intermediate distance from, and far away from the subject, it was concluded that it was not medically possible for the artist to have shot himself without also suffering from powder burns. They noted: “Our opinion as to the cause and manner of death is based on the limited amount of forensic information available. It is, therefore, our opinion, based on that information, that in all medical probability, the cause of death is not a self-inflicted wound by Vincent van Gogh and, thus, in all medical probability, a suicide.”
The story of the tortured artist who never lived to see his work become adored worldwide is one we will never escape—it is cemented into our society. No matter how difficult it is to rewrite this narrative, there are still people who believe that there is a lot of inconclusive evidence surrounding the death of Vincent van Gogh. We may never know whether van Gogh intended to harm himself or if he was the victim of a homicide, but we can continue to search for the truth.
