Was Vincent van Gogh murdered?
The truth can often be an insurmountable obstacle that gets in the way of a good yarn, but despite no incontrovertible evidence to the contrary having ever been provided, there remains a significant number of people who maintain that Vincent van Gogh was murdered.
What can’t be argued is that he died from a gunshot wound to the abdomen on July 29th, 1980, many hours after the injury had been initially inflicted. While shooting yourself in the stomach is guaranteed to cause a long, agonising, and prolonged death, it wasn’t exactly out of character for the eccentric painter.
After all, van Gogh’s life had been afflicted by mental health issues, alcoholism, gonorrhoea, syphilis, and other assorted physical ailments, so he was never one for doing things conventionally. He also had a history of self-inflicted injury after famously lopping off his own ear before reportedly wrapping it up and handing it over to a prostitute as a highly bespoke gift.
Foul play was never suspected at the time, but the lack of thoroughness in the investigation left many questions unanswered and eventually gave rise to the theory that instead of shooting himself and slowly bleeding out over the course of a day, van Gogh was shot by somebody else and left to gradually succumb to his wounds and die the victim of a murder.
The most noted proponents of the murder theory were authors Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, who published their biography Van Gogh: The Life in 2011, where they refused to toe the party line. Instead, they used the more optimistic and uplifting style of his final paintings as an indicator that he wasn’t of a suicidal mindset, claiming that the man himself had previously decried suicide as immorality.
Questions were also asked about how van Gogh travelled two kilometres from the wheat field he supposedly shot himself and in to the room where he eventually passed away, the means required for a public figure with mental health struggles to be able to purchase a gun, and why none of his painting equipment – including easels, brushes, paints, and canvases – were never recovered despite producing over 70 works in the weeks leading up to his death, which indicated his tools were never too far away.
Instead, it was posited that 16-year-old René Secrétan – the son of a powerful local businessman who owned a revolver similar to the one that killed Van Gogh and was part of a gang of teenage tearaways – had decided to take his bullying of the vulnerable artists to new heights by killing him with a single shot.
Historical accounts claim that van Gogh admitted to killing himself, and they also intimate that Secrétan wasn’t even present in the French commune of Auvers on the day of his supposed target’s death. Being murdered at the age of 37 would certainly add another layer to van Gogh’s already-enduring mythology as a tortured genius who struggled with almost every aspect of life away from the canvas, and while there are a lot of people who believe it, there simply isn’t anywhere near enough proof to have it dislodge the widely-accepted means of his death as gospel.
