Did Van Gogh Really Shoot Himself? The Argument That Never Ended

On July 29, 1890, Vincent van Gogh died in a rented attic room in Auvers sur Oise, north of Paris. He was 37. Two days earlier he had walked back from a wheat field with a bullet in his body. How it got there is still being argued about today.

For a century the answer seemed settled. Van Gogh, poor and unrecognized, walked into the wheat with a revolver and shot himself in the chest, then dragged himself back to the Auberge Ravoux and died with his brother Theo beside him. No gun was recovered. No note was found.

It is a story that fits the legend almost too neatly. The painter who sold barely a thing while alive, who had cut off part of his own ear a year and a half earlier, choosing the wheat he had painted so often as the place to end it.

Then you look at the file, and it gets stranger.

The details that refuse to settle

The wound is the first problem. The bullet went in low and at an angle, closer to what you would expect from a shot fired by someone standing beside him than by his own hand. The entry point has bothered researchers for years.

The gun is the second. No weapon was found in the field that day. A corroded revolver was pulled from the same ground generations later and sold at a Paris auction in 2019. Right period, right caliber. Nobody could prove it was his.

The third is what Van Gogh said, and did not say. Asked by the police whether he had wanted to kill himself, he answered, “Do not accuse anyone, it is I who wanted to kill myself.” Read one way, that closes the case. Read another, it is a man making sure no one else gets blamed.

And then the small thing that nags. In his final letters he was ordering more paint. He wrote to Theo about pictures he still meant to make. That is rarely how a man behaves when he has decided to die.

The teenager in the story

In 2011, the biographers Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith finished a thousand page life of the painter and landed on a conclusion that infuriated half the art world. They argued Van Gogh never pulled the trigger.

Their suspect was a local boy named Rene Secretan, sixteen, who liked to dress as a cowboy, carried a faulty pistol, and made sport of tormenting the odd Dutch painter. Their reading: the gun went off, by accident or by cruelty, and Van Gogh, unwilling to send a boy to prison, said nothing and let the wound finish the job.

The Van Gogh Museum rejected it. Its curators, who have read every surviving letter, still hold that the weight of evidence points to suicide. You can read their reasoning straight from the source at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The argument has not cooled since.

Why the question keeps its grip

The forensic fight gets the headlines. What it skips is the texture of the day itself: the coffee at dawn in the Ravoux inn, the thirteen year old girl who wished him good morning on the stairs, the unfinished canvas of tangled tree roots he left on his easel, the long climb uphill into the heat.

The most patient account of those final hours I have found is an unhurried reconstruction of his last day over at Cool Stories About Art. It pushes no theory. It just walks you through the hours, one by one, until the field. After reading it, who fired the shot mattered to me less than the man walking up that slope.

Because whichever version is true, the same fact sits under both. A painter almost nobody wanted while he breathed became, within ten years of his death, one of the most recognized artists on earth.

In 2019, the rusted revolver that may or may not have killed him sold in Paris for about 162,500 euros. Nobody in the room could prove it was the one. They bought it anyway.