The Unending Violence of Vincent van Gogh

Source: The Unending Violence of Vincent van Gogh, Horses, 25:48, uploaded 2023-11-24.

Vincent van Gogh is often treated as the modern image of the tortured artist. Horses accepts that his life contained prolonged mental suffering, although it places the real uncertainty at the end. Van Gogh left the Ravoux Inn on 27 July 1890 to paint in the wheat fields near Auvers-sur-Oise. He returned with a bullet in his stomach and died two days later. History has called the wound self-inflicted for more than a century. The video follows the evidence that unsettles that account and asks who might have fired the gun.

The life that made suicide plausible

Van Gogh’s first serious depression began when he was eighteen and working as an art dealer. A failed infatuation deepened his disappointment with the job, which he already disliked for its commercial character. He turned towards religion and spent four years trying to become a preacher. After he failed to earn a theology degree, he worked as an evangelist in a poor mining town. He gave away almost everything he owned and donated his earnings to the people around him. His superiors treated this poverty as a failure of dignity and dismissed him when he refused to stop.

Van Gogh entered another depression, then abandoned religious work and began painting at twenty-seven. His brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris, supported him financially and morally through a career that brought little income or public recognition. Van Gogh also lived for more than a year with a prostitute and her children, which alienated him from his family. His father threatened to put him in an asylum. When Van Gogh returned to live with his parents in 1885, his father’s sudden death strengthened his commitment to art. He painted and drew with great intensity, producing hundreds of works whilst finding little material success.

Paris brought the next deterioration. Van Gogh drank heavily, especially absinthe, and the video links the alcohol to mental illnesses that may already have been present. He suffered episodes of terror, physical pain, loss of consciousness, anger, and hallucination. He kept Theo awake with arguments about small matters and became unwelcome in homes and restaurants. Theo described him as if two people took turns speaking through him, one gifted and tender, the other hard-hearted and self-defeating. The letter captures the strain of the relationship whilst also showing why Theo continued to protect him.

In 1888 Theo arranged a studio for his brother in Arles and persuaded Paul Gauguin to join him there. Van Gogh produced some of his most intense paintings in Arles, where his moods moved between manic creative work and exhaustion. He drank more absinthe, became increasingly psychotic, and understood that his sanity was failing. He wrote of unexplained anxiety, emptiness, fatigue, melancholy, and atrocious remorse. Painting remained his main way of continuing through the illness.

On Christmas Eve, after two months of constant arguments, Gauguin decided to leave. Van Gogh threw a glass of absinthe at him and later followed him with a razor. Gauguin escaped. Van Gogh returned home, cut off part of his left earlobe, and gave it to a prostitute. The police found him unconscious, and he spent several weeks in hospital in a state of agitation, hallucination, and delusion. He remembered neither the attack on Gauguin nor the mutilation. The video reports that some scholars think auditory hallucinations commanded both acts.

Van Gogh suffered further psychotic episodes, including a severe break in April 1890 that involved religious hallucinations and violent impulses. His doctor declared him cured less than a month later and discharged him. The video finds little evidence that he was ready for release. Van Gogh moved north of Paris to Auvers-sur-Oise and stayed at the Ravoux Inn for the last ten weeks of his life. He stopped drinking, avoided seizures and psychosis, sold a painting, and made roughly one hundred works in seventy days. His life seemed to have reached a short period of calm in the wheat fields.

The wound at the Ravoux Inn

On Sunday 27 July, Van Gogh left the inn after lunch with the intention of painting. The innkeeper, Gustave Ravoux, saw him return in the evening without an easel, canvas, or paints. Van Gogh held his stomach and limped up the dark street. He gave no explanation. After Ravoux heard painful moaning from the attic room, he found the artist curled up on his bed. When asked what had happened, Van Gogh said only, “I have wounded myself.”

Van Gogh received treatment at the inn for two days. At midnight on 29 July, Theo held him whilst he died. Theo later wrote to their mother that life had been a burden for his brother and that he had found the rest he wanted. The ordinary account follows Van Gogh’s statement and Theo’s grief: Van Gogh shot himself in the field, lost the gun, walked back to the inn, and died from the wound.

The scene leaves several details unresolved. The police found no witnesses to Van Gogh’s movements, and no one in the village reported hearing a gunshot. His easel, paints, and canvas disappeared. The gun also disappeared. Van Gogh offered no account of where he got it or why he had tried to kill himself. When the police asked if he had shot himself, he replied, “Yes, I believe so.” He then insisted, without being prompted, “I acted alone. Do not accuse anyone.”

One of the innkeepers later assembled a version of events from Van Gogh’s words and conversations overheard at his bedside. In that account, Van Gogh shot himself in a deep path beside the château wall, fainted, recovered in the cool night, searched for the gun so that he could finish the act, and then walked back to the inn. The story accounts for the broad outline whilst leaving the physical details difficult to follow. A gun should not have fallen so far from his hands. No one found it on the day or the following day. Van Gogh reached the inn without blood marking the path or covering his clothes. He also crossed a steep wooden slope whilst carrying a serious abdominal wound.

Van Gogh had thought about suicide before and had threatened it. In his letters, however, he called suicide weak and terrible, and described it as a crime against art. He wrote that he had come too close to suicide to carry it out, like someone who turns towards the bank after finding the water too cold. Each time he imagined killing himself, he imagined drowning. A river stood near the inn, which makes the choice of a gun harder to reconcile with the pattern in his own writing.

His last days also contain little preparation for death. His final letters to Theo discuss future plans and ask for more paint. His last paintings show the country life around Auvers. Van Gogh wrote constantly about his actions and thoughts, yet he left no suicide note. The weapon raises further questions. A revolver was still unusual and expensive in the south of France, and no one remembered seeing Van Gogh with one. A later claim that he had borrowed it to frighten crows, threatened townspeople with it, or owned it for years has no supporting evidence. Locals inventoried the guns in the days after the shooting and found one missing, although the owner’s later claim that Van Gogh had stolen it remains a rumour.

Van Gogh also appeared desperate to survive. When the doctor arrived, he begged for the bullet to be removed and asked for surgery. Surgeons in Paris were roughly twenty miles away. His doctor, Paul Gachet, refused to operate and left him in agony for another thirty hours. Moving a wounded man would have carried risks, yet death was already the accepted outcome. The decision suggests medical negligence as readily as it suggests anything about the shooting.

The boys’ story and the limits of suspicion

A story persisted in Auvers after Van Gogh’s death. Two young boys had been playing with a gun and accidentally shot him. They stayed silent because they feared a murder charge, whilst Van Gogh protected them by claiming responsibility. The story would fit the generosity that Van Gogh had shown elsewhere in his life and would explain several of the gaps in the suicide account. It remains a rumour. The video treats it as a possible explanation, not as recovered history.

The circumstantial case against suicide remains incomplete. Van Gogh had experienced severe mental illness, had spoken about death, and had just come through periods of psychosis. An irrational action cannot be ruled out by the fact that it looks irrational. The missing weapon, the absent blood trail, the lack of preparation, and the choice of a gun instead of drowning create doubt without identifying a killer. The video keeps that distinction in view before turning to the forensic evidence.

The 2020 forensic reconstruction

In 2020, Irving Kaufman Arenberg, Vincent J. M. Di Maio, and Michael M. Baden published a reevaluation of Van Gogh’s death. They examined the surviving physical and circumstantial evidence and recreated the gunshot with medical staff. Their conclusion, as the video quotes it, was that the available information made a self-inflicted wound medically improbable and pointed towards homicide by another person.

The original physician described the wound as having a red concentric margin and a bluish-brown ring. He did not record black gunpowder burns on Van Gogh’s skin or clothing. Guns of the period used black powder, which left a visible pattern when fired at close range. The video argues that police and doctors routinely examined such burns, so an absent record matters. The policeman who examined the wound concluded that Van Gogh had been shot from one to two feet away, although the official record followed Van Gogh’s own claim that he had fired the gun.

The researchers also examined a revolver found in a wheat field in 1960. The weapon was rusted and bent, and experts at the Van Gogh Museum considered it a likely candidate despite the absence of proof. The researchers fired it into ballistics gel covered with cotton to recreate the clothing Van Gogh might have worn. A point-blank shot left a strong powder burn. The mark weakened at six and eighteen inches and disappeared at twelve inches. The absence of a burn therefore suggested that the gun had been at least twelve inches from Van Gogh’s body.

A person could hold a gun at that distance and shoot themselves. The wound’s trajectory makes that possibility the problem. Based on the physician’s records, the researchers understood the direction in which the bullet had travelled. They found that Van Gogh would have had to contort his body in a virtually impossible way to produce the recorded wound from twelve inches away. Given the weapon and the bullet’s path, their reconstruction made a self-inflicted shot highly unlikely.

The evidence still cannot supply a final verdict. The case is 150 years old. Most of the surviving material comes from eyewitnesses and first-hand accounts that may have changed through memory and repetition. Exhuming Van Gogh would provide little certainty even now. The researchers themselves describe their conclusion as based on limited information. The missing facts can accommodate several explanations, although each requires a different stretch of inference.

A death without agency

The video closes with the diagnoses that later psychologists have proposed, including psychosis, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. None can be confirmed from the surviving record. They do show how difficult it is to separate Van Gogh’s illness from the stories later told about his work and death. His mind and actions were repeatedly taken from his control by experiences that he could neither explain nor prevent.

Suicide and homicide remain the two available explanations for the wound. Each would make his death a form of violence fitted to the life that preceded it. Van Gogh had spent years losing control of his thoughts, his body, his relationships, and the conditions under which he could work. The uncertainty over the gun leaves the final loss of control unresolved. It also keeps the familiar story of the tortured artist from becoming a complete account of the man.

Limits

This note reconstructs Horses’ essay from the complete English caption track, the video’s metadata, its description, its five chapter markers, and the three references named in the description. The historical details, diagnoses, letters, witness accounts, and forensic conclusions remain claims presented by the video unless the linked source is read independently. The captions contain frequent errors in names and words, so I have corrected clear proper names such as Auvers-sur-Oise, Paul Gauguin, and Paul Gachet while keeping uncertain claims qualified.

The 2020 forensic study supports serious doubt about the traditional suicide account, yet it does not identify who fired the gun. The story about two boys, the missing weapon, and the medical treatment at the inn remain circumstantial. The surviving evidence cannot establish homicide as fact, and the video does not resolve that uncertainty.

Further reading / references

• Dietrich Blumer, “The Illness of Vincent van Gogh”, American Journal of Psychiatry, 2002.
• Irving Kaufman Arenberg, Vincent J. M. Di Maio, and Michael M. Baden, “A Reevaluation of the Death of Vincent van Gogh: Suicide or Murder? The Need for a Definitive Autopsy”, The American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, 2020.
• Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Van Gogh: The Life, Random House, 2011.