Happy Birthday, Vincent

Starry Night, June 1889-Saint Remy de Provence



"For my part, I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of stars makes me dream."

Vincent van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853. An intriguing theory about his death in 1890 emerged in 2011: van Gogh did not commit suicide, he was accidently shot by a teenager and being a stand-up guy, accepted responsibility for the shooting himself. An article in the Daily Mail UK:

The Vincent van Gogh story is that the poverty-stricken and unappreciated artist took his own life with a shot to the chest. But, more than a century on, two American writers have cast doubt on his suicide and instead claim he was shot dead by a teenager. Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith claim that Van Gogh was fatally wounded by a friend’s teenage brother who enjoyed  teasing and provoking the mentally ill artist.

During a confrontation in the French town of Auvers-sur-Oise in 1890, the boy somehow opened fire with a gun.They also outline another theory, that Van Gogh was shot by two local boys who were playing with a malfunctioning pistol.

Naifeh and Smith, who won a Pulitzer Prize for their biography  of U.S. artist Jackson Pollock, spent ten years researching their book, which will be released in Britain tomorrow.

In Van Gogh: The Life, they claim that the Dutch impressionist ‘knew nothing about guns’ and that ‘no gun was ever found’ at the scene or anywhere else.They conclude that Van Gogh had a ‘history of violent outbursts’ and suggest a disagreement of some kind may have been his undoing.

According to the official version of his death, Van Gogh was only 37 when he went into a field in Auvers-sur-Oise on the evening of July 27, 1890, and shot himself in the chest with a revolver.

But in their account, Naifeh and Smith claim that there is strong evidence against this, as Van Gogh left no suicide note and the bullet which killed him entered his body ‘from an unusual, oblique angle – not straight on as one would expect in a suicide’. After the shooting he was able to walk back to the village, where he was attended by two physicians, neither of whom possessed the ability to perform surgery to remove the bullet.The following day infection began to set in and he died that evening, 29 hours after he shot himself. His brother Theo, who had rushed to be at his side, claimed his brother's last words were: 'The sadness will last forever.'

The writers, who were granted access to thousands of family letters and had the co-operation of the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, have concluded that a row with a neighbour’s son was the real reason why he was shot, and that as he welcomed his own death he saw no reason to blame anybody else. Van Gogh also only offered ‘hesitant, half-hearted, and oddly hedged’ confessions of his suicide attempt, which they do not find convincing.