A lone figure tramps toward a field of golden wheat. He carries a canvas, an easel, a bag of paints, and a pained grimace. He sets up his kit and begins to paint furiously, rushing to capture the scene of the swirling wheat as a storm approaches. Murderous crows attack him. He flails them away. As the wind whips the wheat into a frenzy, he races to add the ominous clouds to his canvas. Then the threatening crows. When he looks up, his eyes bug out with madness. He goes to a tree and scribbles a note: “I am desperate. I see no way out.” Gritting his teeth in torment, he reaches into his pocket. Cut to a long shot of the wheat field churning in the storm. The sudden report of a gun startles a passing cart driver. The music swells. “The End” appears against a mosaic of famous paintings and a climactic crash of cymbals.
It’s a great scene, the stuff of legend: the death of the world’s most beloved artist, the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh. Lust for Life was conceived in 1934 by the popular pseudo-biographer Irving Stone and captured on film in 1956 by the Oscar-winning director Vincente Minnelli, with the charismatic Kirk Douglas in the principal role.
There’s only one problem. It’s all bunk. Though eagerly embraced by a public in love with a handful of memorable images and spellbound by the thought of an artist who would cut off his own ear, Stone’s suicide yarn was based on bad history, bad psychology, and, as a definitive new expert analysis makes clear, bad forensics. (...)
Van Gogh himself wrote not a word about his final days. The film got it wrong: he left no suicide note—odd for a man who churned out letters so profligately. A piece of writing allegedly found in his clothes after he died turned out to be an early draft of his final letter to his brother Theo, which he posted the day of the shooting, July 27, 1890. That letter was upbeat—even ebullient—about the future. He had placed a large order for more paints only a few days before a bullet put a hole in his abdomen. Because the missile missed his vital organs, it took 29 agonizing hours to kill him.
None of the earliest accounts of the shooting—those written in the days immediately after the event—mentioned suicide. They said only that Van Gogh had “wounded himself.” Strangely, the townspeople of Auvers, the picturesque community near Paris where he stayed in the last months of his life, maintained a studied silence about the incident. At first, no one admitted having seen Van Gogh on his last, fateful outing, despite the summer crowding in the streets. No one knew where he would have gotten a gun; no one admitted to finding the gun afterward, or any of the other items he had taken with him (canvas, easel, paints, etc.). His deathbed doctors, an obstetrician and a homeopathist, could make no sense of his wounds.
And, anyway, what kind of a person, no matter how unbalanced, tries to kill himself with a shot to the midsection? And then, rather than finish himself off with a second shot, staggers a mile back to his room in agonizing pain from a bullet in his belly?
The chief purveyor of the suicide narrative was Van Gogh’s fellow artist Émile Bernard, who wrote the earliest version of artistic self-martyrdom in a letter to a critic whose favor he was currying. Two years earlier, he had tried the same trick when Van Gogh cut off part of his ear. Bernard spun a completely invented account of the event that thrust himself into the sensational tale. “My best friend, my dear Vincent, is mad,” he gushed to the same critic. “Since I have found out, I am almost mad myself.” Bernard was not present at the time of Vincent’s fatal shooting, but he did attend the funeral.
If later accounts are to be believed—and they often are not—the police briefly investigated the shooting. (No records survive.) The local gendarme who interviewed Vincent on his deathbed had to prompt him with the open question “Did you intend to commit suicide?” To which he answered (again, according to later accounts) with a puzzled equivocation: “I think so.”
That account, like almost all the other “early accounts” of Van Gogh’s botched suicide, rested mainly on the testimony of one person: Adeline Ravoux, the daughter of the owner of the Ravoux Inn, where Van Gogh was staying in Auvers, and where he died. Adeline was 13 at the time. She did not speak for the record until 1953. When she did, she mostly channeled the stories her father, Gustave, had told her half a century earlier. Her story changed constantly, developing dramatic shape, and even dialogue, with each telling.
Around the same time, another witness stepped forward. He was the son of Paul Gachet, the homeopathic doctor who had sat for a famous portrait by Van Gogh. Paul junior was 17 at the time of the shooting. He spent most of the rest of his life inflating his own and his father’s importance to the artist—and, not incidentally, the value of the paintings father and son had stripped from Vincent’s studio in the days after his death. It was Paul junior who introduced the idea that the shooting had taken place in the wheat fields outside Auvers. Even Theo’s son, Vincent (the painter’s namesake and godson), who founded the museum, dismissed Gachet Jr. as “highly unreliable.”
It’s a great scene, the stuff of legend: the death of the world’s most beloved artist, the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh. Lust for Life was conceived in 1934 by the popular pseudo-biographer Irving Stone and captured on film in 1956 by the Oscar-winning director Vincente Minnelli, with the charismatic Kirk Douglas in the principal role.There’s only one problem. It’s all bunk. Though eagerly embraced by a public in love with a handful of memorable images and spellbound by the thought of an artist who would cut off his own ear, Stone’s suicide yarn was based on bad history, bad psychology, and, as a definitive new expert analysis makes clear, bad forensics. (...)
Van Gogh himself wrote not a word about his final days. The film got it wrong: he left no suicide note—odd for a man who churned out letters so profligately. A piece of writing allegedly found in his clothes after he died turned out to be an early draft of his final letter to his brother Theo, which he posted the day of the shooting, July 27, 1890. That letter was upbeat—even ebullient—about the future. He had placed a large order for more paints only a few days before a bullet put a hole in his abdomen. Because the missile missed his vital organs, it took 29 agonizing hours to kill him.
None of the earliest accounts of the shooting—those written in the days immediately after the event—mentioned suicide. They said only that Van Gogh had “wounded himself.” Strangely, the townspeople of Auvers, the picturesque community near Paris where he stayed in the last months of his life, maintained a studied silence about the incident. At first, no one admitted having seen Van Gogh on his last, fateful outing, despite the summer crowding in the streets. No one knew where he would have gotten a gun; no one admitted to finding the gun afterward, or any of the other items he had taken with him (canvas, easel, paints, etc.). His deathbed doctors, an obstetrician and a homeopathist, could make no sense of his wounds.
And, anyway, what kind of a person, no matter how unbalanced, tries to kill himself with a shot to the midsection? And then, rather than finish himself off with a second shot, staggers a mile back to his room in agonizing pain from a bullet in his belly?
The chief purveyor of the suicide narrative was Van Gogh’s fellow artist Émile Bernard, who wrote the earliest version of artistic self-martyrdom in a letter to a critic whose favor he was currying. Two years earlier, he had tried the same trick when Van Gogh cut off part of his ear. Bernard spun a completely invented account of the event that thrust himself into the sensational tale. “My best friend, my dear Vincent, is mad,” he gushed to the same critic. “Since I have found out, I am almost mad myself.” Bernard was not present at the time of Vincent’s fatal shooting, but he did attend the funeral.
If later accounts are to be believed—and they often are not—the police briefly investigated the shooting. (No records survive.) The local gendarme who interviewed Vincent on his deathbed had to prompt him with the open question “Did you intend to commit suicide?” To which he answered (again, according to later accounts) with a puzzled equivocation: “I think so.”
That account, like almost all the other “early accounts” of Van Gogh’s botched suicide, rested mainly on the testimony of one person: Adeline Ravoux, the daughter of the owner of the Ravoux Inn, where Van Gogh was staying in Auvers, and where he died. Adeline was 13 at the time. She did not speak for the record until 1953. When she did, she mostly channeled the stories her father, Gustave, had told her half a century earlier. Her story changed constantly, developing dramatic shape, and even dialogue, with each telling.
Around the same time, another witness stepped forward. He was the son of Paul Gachet, the homeopathic doctor who had sat for a famous portrait by Van Gogh. Paul junior was 17 at the time of the shooting. He spent most of the rest of his life inflating his own and his father’s importance to the artist—and, not incidentally, the value of the paintings father and son had stripped from Vincent’s studio in the days after his death. It was Paul junior who introduced the idea that the shooting had taken place in the wheat fields outside Auvers. Even Theo’s son, Vincent (the painter’s namesake and godson), who founded the museum, dismissed Gachet Jr. as “highly unreliable.”
