This week the National Gallery opens a brilliant new show of major works by one of the most luminous and original of all European artists, Vincent Van Gogh — for whom the label “troubled genius” is a drastic understatement.
Some of the masterworks are from the last 10 weeks of his life when he had moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, after checking out of a mental hospital at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. He painted a picture a day for 10 weeks in a fever of activity. On the afternoon of July 27, 1890, he set out to paint tree roots.
Tree Roots, a daring almost abstract work, was to be his last. He returned to the inn of the Ravoux family in the evening. Clutching a wound across his stomach, he stumbled past the landlord to his room, muttering incoherently. His doctor and mentor, Paul Gachet, a gendarme, and his brother Theo were summoned the following day. They could do little. Van Gogh died shortly after one o’clock on the morning of July 29.
He had shot himself by the wheatfields as depression returned. A clear case of suicide. Or was it?
Apparently, Van Gogh had acquired a hunting pistol, which he packed in his painting kit before setting out for the fields. Having shot himself, he threw the pistol down, and scrabbled around for hours to find it to finish the job. He couldn’t find it. The pistol and the painting equipment weren’t recovered from the scene.
This is the version accepted by the keepers of the Van Gogh flame, the Van Gogh Institute and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Dr Gachet, charged with his mental care, his erstwhile pal Paul Gauguin and brother Theo all believed he had killed himself — after all, he had been suicidal for years, even trying to poison himself with his own paints the year before his death.
But almost nothing about the Van Gogh suicide story adds up. A rusty pistol was found by a farmer in a hedgerow nearly 70 years later, and sold to a private bidder for £144,000 five years ago. The Van Gogh Institute doubted its authenticity.
There is nothing so deceptive as an obvious fact, said Van Gogh’s great fictional contemporary, Sherlock Holmes. Among the most obvious facts of the case are that the painter didn’t own a gun, no one knows how he could have got one, and it would have been impossible to inflict the angled abdominal wound by himself.
This was the verdict of one of the most eminent gunshot wound experts and pathologists of the last century, Dr Vincent Di Maio, who had examined the fatal wounding of Lee Harvey Oswald, among others. Invited by two biographers, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, to look at the evidence of the wound in 2014, Dr Di Maio concluded, “It is my opinion that, in all medical probability, the wound incurred by Van Gogh was not self-inflicted. In other words, he did not shoot himself.”
Dr Di Maio said he would have to have been shot from at least two feet away, such was the lack of gunpowder residue — but this in turn has been disputed.
But, if he didn’t do it himself, who did shoot Van Gogh?
But, if he didn’t do it himself, who did shoot Van Gogh? This is where we get into a flurry of contradictory, unauthenticated, anecdotal, untested statements and assertions.
A group of boys, one dressed as a cowboy — this was the height of the Buffalo Bill craze — were seen to tease and taunt Van Gogh on several occasions out in the fields. They were hoorays down from Paris. Van Gogh himself cut a sorry figure, shambling, smelly, addicted to absinthe, toothless. White Smith and Naifeh’s book, Van Gogh: The Life, refers to an interview in the Fifties with René Secrétan, who admitted that he was the 16-year-old leader of the gang taunting Van Gogh, and shooting rabbits with a pistol. Just before he died in 1957, wealthy businessman Secrétan described meeting Van Gogh several times — describing him as “more like a tramp” than a genius artist. He said he only learnt of Van Gogh’s death later from the newspapers. Mysteriously, young Secrétan abruptly broke his holidays at Auvers to return to Paris.
In 1930, an art historian and reporter John Rewald went to Auvers to visit the sites of Van Gogh’s last paintings. The Auberge Ravoux was being restored yet again to be a shrine to the artist, which it is to this day. Rewald reported that all the talk of the village was that the painter had been tormented by a gang of rowdy boys from Paris, who liked playing cowboys and playing with guns.
An important, though not entirely credible, witness is Adeline Ravoux, 13, daughter of the innkeeper, whom Van Gogh painted in three wonderful portraits, one of which can be seen in the London show. In 1953 she gave a detailed account about Van Gogh at the inn and seeing him returning after dusk on July 27, clutching his stomach as he staggered to his room. Allegedly, he said he “would have to do it all over again” if this didn’t succeed. Other accounts say he was barely coherent as he muttered to the innkeeper, who only later that night called a doctor.
Adeline wrote in the Fifties that Van Gogh barely knew Dr Gachet, who lived in the next village, and he didn’t like him. This is nonsense. Gachet was the reason Van Gogh came to Auvers, because Gaugin and Lucien Pissarro thought him very good with mentally unstable artists.
The jury is out. The best verdict on the case of the murder, or attempted murder, of Van Gogh would be the Scottish law, one of not proven — for either suicide or murder.
Does it matter? Yes, it does. Van Gogh was a genius outsider, awkward, intense, quarrelsome. He was also highly literate and inquisitive. His dramatic images, flaming cypresses, scorching wheatfields, lively sitters, are quite original. He gave us a revolution in colour.
