In his reports to Jo from Vincent’s bedside, Theo, too, gave no hint that his brother had made a suicide attempt—or that he, Theo, suspected one.72 He portrayed Vincent as sad (“Poor fellow, he wasn’t granted a lavish share of happiness”)73 but not suicidal. Nothing in Vincent’s room or studio indicated an intention to commit suicide. He had left no farewell note. He hadn’t even straightened up.74 His most recent letters had been filled with expressions of buoyant spirits75 and inviting sketches of his new home in Auvers.76 Indeed, only days before, he had placed a large order for new paints and other supplies—hardly the act of a man planning to end his life, especially one so sensitive about spending his brother’s money.
Besides, as Theo knew well, Vincent had always rejected suicide in the most vehement terms. He called it “terrible” and “wicked.”77 He thought it cowardly78 and dishonest.79 Even on the verge of despair in the Borinage in 1881, he had assured Theo, “I really do not think I am a man with such inclinations.”80 From Drenthe, too, during another period of deep melancholy, he had made his feelings on suicide clear: “As regards making oneself scarce or disappearing—now or ever—neither you nor I should ever do that, no more than commit suicide.”81 (Emphasis in original.)
Theo also knew his brother well enough to know that if he ever did try to commit suicide, he would not have used a gun, a device about which he knew virtually nothing.82 On the other hand, he knew a great deal about poisons, and he could have used that knowledge to see himself off with far less bother and pain.83 Of the various methods of suicide, drowning was the means Vincent had always considered the most “artistic”84 and the only one he had ever threatened (once, in a moment of pique).85
The first commentator to raise the possibility that Vincent had attempted suicide was neither a witness to the shooting nor present at Vincent’s deathbed. On July 30, Émile Bernard came to Auvers to attend Vincent’s funeral. Two days later, he wrote a letter to the critic Albert Aurier—the same critic to whom Bernard had sent a sensationally fictionalized account of the ear incident in Arles two years earlier.86 This letter contained the first recorded description of the shooting incident and the first suggestion of a suicide attempt: “On Sunday evening [July 27] [Van Gogh] went into the Auvers countryside, placed his easel against a haystack and went behind the château to shoot himself with a revolver.” 87
What was the basis of this account? Bernard claimed that he had heard the details from townspeople, especially Gustave Ravoux, the owner of the inn where Vincent died. But Bernard was a prolific and inventive fabricator,88 Ravoux left no account of his own, and Auvers was abuzz with baseless rumors by the time of the funeral. The police had already begun investigating the shooting and interviewing witnesses. People who knew of Vincent’s stay in an asylum and had seen his deformed ear were quick to assume a connection between self-mutilation and suicide—a connection debunked by later research.89 Suspicion of suicide ran so high that the local abbot refused to allow Vincent’s body to be carried by the parish hearse or buried near the church.90
A week later (August 7), a brief article in L’Écho Pontoisien, a local paper, rejected the sensational rumors of suicide and reported the incident in straightforward terms, leaving the possibility of an accident conspicuously open:
On Sunday July 27, one van Gogh, aged thirty-seven, a Dutch painter staying at Auvers, shot himself with a revolver in the fields, but, being only wounded, returned to his room, where he died two days later.91
In fact, the gendarmes investigating the incident must have assumed at first that they were dealing with an accidental shooting.92 They would quickly have learned from interviews that Vincent was not accustomed to firearms (he had never been seen with a gun),93 that he drank heavily at times, that he took liquor with him on painting expeditions, and that he was clumsy and reckless in his manner and therefore prone to accidents.94
They surely knew from experience what subsequent studies have shown: that an overwhelming majority (98 percent) of suicides using guns involve a shot to the head, not to the chest or abdomen.95 The fact that Vincent immediately sought medical care also pointed to an accidental shooting. A man truly bent on suicide would have finished himself off with a second shot rather than make the steep, difficult descent to the Ravoux Inn with a bullet in his belly.96 Pulling the trigger again would have taken far less energy and caused far less pain. Also, Vincent’s attending doctors had probably already told the officers that the fatal shot was fired from an odd angle and from “too far out,”97 the first suggesting that it was an accidental discharge and the second that someone else might have pulled the trigger.
Indeed, the primary question for the police would have been not whether the shooting was a suicide or an accident, but whether others were involved in it—a possibility made more likely by the disappearance of the pistol and all of Vincent’s painting equipment. When a thorough daylight search of the area failed to produce a single missing item (and nothing was turned in by locals), the inevitable assumption was that somebody had hidden or disposed of the evidence, either at the time of the shooting or immediately afterward.
But Bernard’s dramatic tale of an artist driven to suicide had planted a seed in the Van Gogh legend that could not be uprooted by logic or lack of evidence. Even those with firsthand knowledge of the events of July 27, 1890, were subject to its allure. Anton Hirschig was a twenty-three-year-old Dutch artist who happened to be lodging at the Ravoux Inn the day Vincent was wounded. In 1912, twenty-two years later, when Hirschig first set down his recollections of the events he witnessed that night in 1890, he did not mention suicide. He recalled Vincent saying only, “Go and get me the doctor … I wounded myself in the fields … I shot myself with a revolver there”98—a statement that, like Gachet’s, is as consistent with a careless accident as with an attempted suicide.
It was not until 1934—the same year that Irving Stone immortalized Bernard’s sad version in Lust for Life—that Hirschig testified to Vincent’s suicidal intent that day in July 1890, forty-four years earlier. “I can see him in his little bed in his little attic, in the grip of terrible pain,” Hirschig told an interviewer. “ ‘I couldn’t stick it any longer, so I shot myself,’ he said.”99
The story that began with Bernard’s letter—the story of a suicide attempt in the wheat field—was not fully fleshed out until the 1950s, when the centenary of Vincent’s birth touched off a decade-long celebration of the painter’s life and work. The person chiefly responsible for turning Bernard’s slender tale into the definitive account of Vincent’s final days was Adeline Ravoux, the daughter of the innkeeper Gustave Ravoux, a girl of thirteen at the time of the shooting. Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, Adeline gave repeated interviews regarding Vincent’s death, adding fresh details and heightening the drama with each telling.100
Adeline’s accounts followed the broad outlines of Bernard’s tale, and, like Bernard, she claimed her dead father as her ultimate source. For her versions of events that the innkeeper did not witness—such as the shooting itself—she claimed that Vincent had confided his story to her father in the hours before his death. By this process, events that had been shrouded in mystery for sixty years sprang suddenly into the record in full, rich detail. Here, for example, is Adeline’s 1956 account—her first—of the day of the shooting:
Vincent had gone toward the wheat field where he had painted before, situated behind the château of Auvers, which then belonged to M. Gosselin, who lived in Paris on the rue de Messine. The château was more than a half kilometer from our house. You reached it by climbing a rather steep slope shaded by big trees. We do not know how far away he stood from the château. During the afternoon, in the deep path that lies along the wall of the château—as my father understood it—Vincent shot himself and fainted. The coolness of the night revived him. On all fours he looked for the gun to finish himself off, but he could not find it. (Nor was it found the next day either.) Then Vincent got up and climbed down the hillside to return to ou
r house.101
Adeline Ravoux’s accounts seem unreliable for a number of reasons: (1) By her own telling, they are mostly hearsay: 102 that is, they involve recollections of what her father told her he saw or heard, not what she actually witnessed or heard. (2) Her multiple accounts are often internally inconsistent as well as inconsistent with one another. 103 (3) Her accounts are distorted by her determination to prove her father’s closeness to the famous artist (a project that became her life’s work).104 (4) Her later accounts are vastly more detailed than her earlier ones. In particular, she often added dialogue to enhance the drama of her stories,105 sometimes conjuring whole scenes.106 (5) She appears to have adjusted her accounts over time to respond to critics or to correct inconsistencies.107
Perhaps the best example of Adeline’s fitting her account to the requirements of the moment was the startling admission in her last set of interviews (in the 1960s) that the revolver that killed Vincent van Gogh had belonged to her father108—a fact that neither she nor her father had volunteered for more than seventy years, despite intense inquiry throughout that time into where Vincent procured the fatal weapon and why.109
Adeline’s new account confirmed René Secrétan’s story that the pistol was her father’s, but not René’s alibi that Vincent had stolen the gun from his rucksack. Instead, she told the interviewer (Tralbaut) that Vincent had asked her father for the gun “in order to scare away crows”—a patent falsehood, since Vincent had no fear of birds and thought of crows in particular as good omens.110 At the time Adeline told this story, however, it was widely believed that Vincent’s last painting was Wheatfield with Crows,111 thus lending both credibility to her story and extra poignancy to the painting. It is now known that Wheatfield with Crows was painted around July 10, two weeks before the fatal shooting.112
OUR RECONSTRUCTION OF the events of July 27, 1890, is based on an analysis of all the evidence, both direct and circumstantial, that is in the public record, and a weighing of all the witness testimonies that bear on the events of that day, from the multiple accounts of Adeline Ravoux to the deathbed confessions of René Secrétan.
It is also precisely the story that John Rewald heard when he went to Auvers in the 1930s and interviewed residents of the town who had been living there at the time of Vincent’s death. Rewald, a scholar of unparalleled integrity and thoroughness, went on to become the ultimate authority on both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, about which he wrote two magisterial surveys and many other books, including volumes on Cézanne and Seurat. The story he heard was that “young boys shot Vincent accidentally” and that “they were reluctant to speak up for fear of being accused of murder and that Van Gogh decided to protect them and to be a martyr.”113
Fifty years later (in 1988), Rewald recounted this story to a young scholar named Wilfred Arnold, who included it in his 1992 book, Vincent van Gogh: Chemicals, Crises, and Creativity. Arnold openly attributed the story to Rewald, who died two years later. Other than in his conspicuous failure to “correct” Arnold’s report, to our knowledge Rewald never directly confirmed or challenged the alternate version of Van Gogh’s death that he had heard in Auvers. He did, however, revise his seminal overview of Post-Impressionism by citing Victor Doiteau’s interview with René Secrétan in which it was first revealed that the weapon that killed Van Gogh was the pistol that young René had acquired from Gustave Ravoux.114 A meticulous scholar, Rewald had to realize that René Secrétan’s guilt-ridden story of teasing the painter to the point of “torture” and supplying him (willingly or not) with the weapon that killed him confirmed the rumors that he had heard two decades earlier about young boys accidentally causing the death of Vincent van Gogh.
Notes
1. For all the reports on Vincent’s wound, see chapter 43.
2. Sjraar van Heugten, “Vincent van Gogh as a Hero of Fiction,” in The Mythology of Vincent van Gogh, edited by Tsukasa Kôdera and Yvette Rosenberg (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1993), p. 162.
3. Much of the material in this note appears elsewhere in the text (primarily in chapter 43, “Illusions Fade; the Sublime Remains”), at those points where it is relevant to the narrative. We have brought it together here in order to present it as clearly and cogently as possible.
4. René Secrétan was born in January 1874. Victor Doiteau, “Deux ‘copains’ de Van Gogh, inconnus: Les frères Gaston et René Secrétan, Vincent, tel qu’ils l’ont vu” [“Two Unknown Pals of Van Gogh: The Brothers Gaston and René Secrétan, Vincent as They Saw Him”], Aesculape 40, March 1957, p. 57.
5. Doiteau, p. 39.
6. Paul Gachet, “Les Médecins de Théodore and de Vincent van Gogh” [“The Doctors of Theodorus and Vincent van Gogh”], Aesculape 40, March 1957, p. 38.
7. Gaston was born on December 18, 1871. Doiteau, p. 57.
8. Quoted in Doiteau, p. 40.
9. Doiteau, p. 40.
10. Quoted in Doiteau, p. 55.
11. Doiteau, pp. 55–56.
12. “He always spoke French with the indefinable accent I have already mentioned of those who’ve moved around a lot.” Quoted in Doiteau, p. 56.
13. Specifically, 72° Pernod. Doiteau, p. 41.
14. Quoted in Doiteau, p. 40.
15. Doiteau, p. 42.
16. Quoted in Doiteau, p. 39.
17. According to René, Buffalo Bill was all the fashion among young people at the time. Doiteau, p. 45.
18. Quoted in Doiteau, p. 45.
19. Doiteau, p. 46.
20. Doiteau, p. 46.
21. Doiteau, p. 56.
22. Quoted in Doiteau, p. 42.
23. Quoted in Doiteau, p. 45.
24. Quoted in Doiteau, p. 41.
25. Quoted in Doiteau, p. 41.
26. Doiteau, p. 56.
27. Ibid.
28. See chapter 43.
29. Doiteau, p. 44.
30. Quoted in Doiteau, p. 42.
31. Quoted in Doiteau, p. 47.
32. Doiteau, p. 44.
33. Quoted in Doiteau, p. 42.
34. Doiteau, p. 42.
35. Quoted in Doiteau, p. 44.
36. Quoted in Doiteau, p. 42.
37. Quoted in Doiteau, p. 41.
38. See chapter 43.
39. Marc Edo Tralbaut, Vincent van Gogh (New York: Viking, 1969), p. 326. Tralbaut says that Madame Liberge was “about Marguerite Gachet’s age,” which was twenty at the time of Vincent’s death.
40. Quoted in Tralbaut, p. 326.
41. Quoted in Tralbaut, p. 326. Tralbaut comments: “The puzzle remains: why has this account, which is more than ninety years old, never appeared in any biography of Vincent?” (p. 326).
42. Quoted in Ken Wilkie, In Search of Van Gogh (Rocklin, Calif.: Prima, 1991), p. 124.
43. In his 1911 letter to Plasschaert, Hirschig reports accompanying Vincent on one such trip to Pontoise (b3023V/1983, “Hirschig, A. M.” to “Plasschaert, A.,” 9/8/1911, partly published in Jan van Crimpen, “Friends Remember Vincent in 1912,” International Symposium (Tokyo 1988), p. 86.
44. Doiteau, pp. 42–43.
45. Doiteau, p. 41.
46. Vincent knew that René kept the revolver in his rucksack. He had seen it there often. Doiteau, p. 46.
47. Doiteau and Edgar Leroy, “Vincent van Gogh et le drame de l’oreille coupée” [“Vincent van Gogh and the Drama of the Severed Ear”], Aesculape, 1936, p. 280. See chapter 43.
48. “Hirschig, A. M.” to “Bredius, A.” (published in Oud-Holland, 1934). Quoted in Tralbaut, p. 328. See chapter 43.
49. Doiteau and Leroy, p. 280. See chapter 43.
50. In a late addendum to her account, Adeline Ravoux maintained that after he awoke from his faint, Vincent did try to shoot himself again, but he could not find the gun. Adeline Carrié-Ravoux, “Recollections on Vincent van Gogh’s Stay in Auvers-sur-Oise,” in Les Cahiers de Van Gogh in 1956, in Van Gogh: A Retrospective, edited by Susan Alyson Stein (New York: Hugh Lauter Associates and Macmillan, 1986), p. 214. That could be
true; the Secrétans could already have taken it.
51. Quoted in Ronald Pickvance, Van Gogh in Saint-Rémy and Auvers (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986), p. 216.
52. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), p. 40.
53. Quoted in Carrié-Ravoux, in Stein, p. 215.
54. Ibid.
55. Interestingly, when the gendarmes continued to press Vincent on the issue of the possible involvement of others in the shooting, it was Gustave Ravoux who intervened to stop that line of questioning. According to his daughter’s account, after Vincent told them “Do not accuse anyone; it is I who wanted to kill myself,” her father “begged the officers, somewhat harshly, not to insist any further.” Quoted in Carrié-Ravoux, in Stein, p. 215. This intervention can be seen, as Adeline intended it, as an example of her father’s solicitude toward Vincent—or as an effort to ensure that Vincent, in his unguarded delirium, did not implicate the Secrétan brothers in the shooting.
56. b2066 V/1982, “Gogh, Theo van” to “Gogh-Bonger, Jo van,” 7/28/1890.
57. b6918 V/1996, “Bernard, Émile” to “Aurier, Albert,” quoted in Bernard, “On Vincent’s Burial,” in Stein, p. 220.
58. b3266 V/1966, “Gachet, Paul-Ferdinand” to “Gogh, Theo van,” c. 8/15/1890.
59. Johanna van Gogh–Bonger, The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), letter 355a, January 1885 (hereafter, BVG). Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten, and Nienke Bakker, Vincent van Gogh: The Letters; The Complete Illustrated and Annotated Edition (London: Thames and Hudson, 2009), letter 474, 12/10/1884 (hereafter, JLB): “If I were to drop dead—which I shan’t refuse if it comes but won’t expressly seek—you’d be standing on a skeleton—and—that would be a mightily insecure standpoint” (emphasis in original).
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