Morgue (35 page)

Then in 1956, a tantalizing new piece of the puzzle hit French newspapers. An elderly Parisian banker named René Secrétan came forward to confess that he and his brother, then just teenagers, knew Vincent in Auvers. The two bullied and teased the artist by putting snakes in his paint kit, dousing his coffee with salt, sprinkling chili pepper on the brushes that he held in his mouth as he worked, and persuading some girls to pretend to seduce Vincent.

Sixteen-year-old René liked to dress in a buckskin outfit he bought when Buffalo Bill's Wild West show played in Paris the year before—and likely posed for Vincent's sketch
Head of Boy with Broad-Brimmed Hat
some time in the weeks before Vincent's death.

But no Buffalo Bill poseur's garb would be complete without a gun, so René bought or borrowed a faulty old revolver from Gustave Ravoux. That ancient gun, René said in his 1956 interview, “went off when it felt like it.”

Suddenly, a firsthand account lent a little credence to the old Auvers rumor that Vincent had been shot accidentally by two boys. Could it have been the inseparable brothers, René and Gaston Secrétan, and their balky pistol? Had René been playing cowboy when the gun went off? Had his teasing finally provoked Vincent into an ultimately fatal fight?

Nobody knows. René wasn't asked and never confessed to shooting Vincent, but rather, he suggested that the artist had stolen the gun from his rucksack and shot himself with it that same day.

René and Gaston disappeared from Auvers around the time of Vincent's death. In the 1956 interview, René claimed he learned of the shooting from an article in a Paris newspaper, but no such article has ever been found.

A follow-up interview never happened. René Secrétan died the next year.

In the 1960s, another piece fell into place when another former Auvers woman claimed her father had seen Vincent in a farmyard—in the opposite direction of the wheat field where he claimed to be—on that fateful afternoon. And soon after, another person came forward with a story about a gunshot that was heard in that same farmyard area, although no blood or gun was ever discovered.

If those recollections were accurate, Naifeh and Smith theorized, it's likely that Vincent was wounded in a farmyard closer to Ravoux's inn, and that the boys fled the scene with the gun and Vincent's painting supplies. The way back to the inn was also more navigable by a wounded man than the steep escarpment from the fields.

But why would the artist then claim to have shot himself? The sad answer, his biographers believe, is that Vincent welcomed death. He might have realized (or assumed) he was dying and made his peace with it. Maybe he thought dying was all for the best. The boys had done for him what he couldn't do for himself in good conscience. He returned the favor by lying to protect them from prosecution.

They found no smoking gun, either literally or figuratively. But this hypothesis made more sense to Naifeh and Smith than the accepted, overly romantic suicide theory. It answered so many previously unanswered questions: Why hadn't the gun ever been found? Why would Vincent choose to shoot himself in such a peculiar way? Why would he have lugged a large new canvas and all his painting gear a mile if he only intended to kill himself? Why were his deathbed “confessions” so tentative and hedged?

Some in the art world added one more question: “You're joking, right?”

Naifeh and Smith had blasphemed. They might as well have nailed a thesis about the impossibility of resurrection to the Vatican door.

Many van Gogh scholars have been quietly uncomfortable with the suicide story, but Naifeh and Smith's homicide theory didn't just feel like shameless book promotion; it threatened the romantic symbolism of an artist's struggle against an indifferent world.

“There's plenty of reason to look at the unclear circumstances again,” said curator Leo Jansen of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. “We cannot yet agree with their conclusions because we do not think there is enough evidence yet. There's no proof.”

Jansen admitted that Vincent's suicide confession couldn't be proven either. It's just what Vincent said, and he had no reason to lie about it.

While some art writers and Internet trolls were more caustic in their response to Naifeh and Smith, others argued that even a clumsy suicide was a far more logical conclusion, a last irrational act by a disturbed man who'd acted irrationally before. What's so incredible about a lunatic who had mutilated his own ear shooting himself in a highly unusual way?

And finally, there were the guardians of the sacred myth.

“If Vincent van Gogh would have died of old age at 80 in 1933, basking in glory and in possession of his two ears, he would never have become the myth he is today,” the Dutch daily
De Volkskrant
editorialized after Naifeh and Smith's theory went public. “Van Gogh's psychoses, his depressions, his mistakes and their manifestations—an ear cut off, a suicide—are more pertinent to the painter narrative, mystique and inscrutability than his cypresses and corn fields.”

In 2013, scholars Louis van Tilborgh and Teio Meedendorp of the Van Gogh Museum mounted a vigorous frontal assault on the homicide theory. Their far-reaching article in a prestigious British art magazine argued point by point that the only genuine inference was suicide.

As evidence, they prominently submitted the wound described by Dr. Gachet—a hole rimmed with brown and encircled by a purplish halo. The purple ring, they said, was a bruise caused by the bullet's impact and the brown edge was powder-burned skin, proving that Vincent held the gun against his side, possibly even under his shirt.

Van Tilborgh and Meedendorp argued that Vincent was highly agitated by turmoil in Theo's life and a little off-balance in Auvers. In Vincent's last paintings, Naifeh and Smith had seen brighter, more hopeful strokes, but the scholars saw ominous, darker emotions.

The scholars also disputed any interpretation of the Secrétan interview as a “confession” and dismissed the old, secondhand rumors about gunplay by teenagers.

“Truly nothing substantiates their argument for the train of events they construe,” Tilborgh and Meedendorp summarized, “apart from a twentieth-century rumour arising from an authentic story of a trigger-happy brat in 1890, who merely claimed that van Gogh probably stole the gun from him. And we do not doubt that for a moment.”

The
Burlington Magazine
article by two van Gogh experts offered more questions than answers, but they had unambiguously challenged the new theory

With their largely circumstantial argument under counter-attack, Naifeh and Smith needed solid scientific evidence. They needed an expert on gunshot wounds to examine all the evidence and reach a scientifically unassailable conclusion.

So one summer day, my phone rang.

*   *   *

It was easy to see what
didn't
happen. In all medical probability, Vincent van Gogh didn't shoot himself.

How did I know? I cannot know beyond a shadow of doubt, just as I cannot know what was in the mad genius's disturbed mind and heart on the day he was shot. Although it might have been dark and disordered, nothing suggests he was in a psychotic state.

Of course, I only knew what books and movies had said about van Gogh, his instability, his self-mutilation, his genius in art, his suicide. Like most people, I wasn't aware there had been any dispute about any of it.

Nevertheless, the new facts that lay before me 123 years later—and everything I know about gunshot wounds—spoke loud and clear: Vincent's mortal wound was almost certainly not self-inflicted.

There were several reasons for my opinion.

The first was the general location of his wound, although it was never recorded precisely. Drs. Mazery and Gachet described the wound's location differently. A 1928 book by Victor Doiteau and Edgar Leroy said it was “along the side of the left ribs, a little before the axillary line,” an imaginary vertical demarcation from the armpit to the waist. In other words, the bullet entered Vincent's side about where his elbow would touch his chest if he stood with his arms at his sides.

But did it go through his rib cage or the soft tissue below the ribs?

If you accept Dr. Mazery's original observation, the wound was in Vincent's left abdomen, just under his ribs.

How odd would that location be for a suicide shot? When my colleague Dr. Kimberly Molina and I reviewed 747 suicides for a study of handgun wound locations, ranges, and manner of death, we found only 1.3 percent of self-inflicted gunshots were in the abdomen.

If you accept the 1928 account that the bullet pierced Vincent's left-side rib cage, we found that only 12.7 percent of suicides shot themselves in the chest. And overwhelmingly most of those were direct shots over the heart, not obliquely fired into the side.

Simply put, very few suicides, no matter how frightened or deluded, choose to shoot themselves in their sides.

But if Vincent did, that raises a whole different question.

Let's assume Vincent was the exception. Let's assume he consciously chose to shoot himself in his left side with a handgun. How would he do it?

It is widely accepted that Vincent was right-handed, so even if he'd decided to shoot himself in his side, why pick the side that would require the most awkward shot?

The easiest way for Vincent to have made this shot would have been to wrap his left hand's fingers around the back of the grip and pull the trigger with his thumb. He might even have steadied the pistol with his right hand, but he would have suffered powder burns on his right palm where he grasped the body of the gun, caused by flames, gas, and powder blowing out of the cylinder gap.

Using his right hand would have been even more absurd. He would have had to cross his right arm over his chest, wrap his fingers around the gun's grip and pull the trigger with his thumb. And again, if he'd used his left hand to steady the weapon, it would have suffered powder burns.

No such powder burns were reported by Theo, the two doctors, the two gendarmes, or any of the people who saw Vincent alive or dead after the shooting.

Even if you can accept the contortions it would have required in either case, the gun's muzzle would have been against Vincent's skin or, at most, a couple of inches away.

And that's the most important reason I believe his wound was not self-inflicted.

Vincent's wound was described by the attending doctors as pea-sized, with a reddish brown margin, and ringed by a purplish blue halo. The skin is otherwise clear and there's no sign of powder burns.

Some proponents of the suicide theory argue the purplish halo was a bruise caused by the bullet's impact. Not so. It is, in fact, internal bleeding from vessels severed by the bullet, and I've seen it many times in people who live a while after they've been shot. Its presence (or absence) means nothing significant.

The reddish brown rim around the entrance wound itself is not powder-burned skin, but an abrasion ring seen around virtually all entrance wounds. Again, not significant except that it signifies an entrance wound.

But the most important element of this entrance wound is what
isn't
there.

Handgun cartridges of the 1890s were loaded with black powder, which burns very dirty. Smokeless powder had been invented in 1884, but at the time of Vincent's shooting, it was only used in cartridges for a few military rifles.

Close-range wounds by bullets from black-powder cartridges are messy. When black powder ignites, some 56 percent of its mass is solid residue, which bursts forth in a scorching spray of carbon particles.

If Vincent shot himself, he would have held the gun point-blank against his skin, or maybe just a couple of inches away (because in 98.5 percent of all suicides the shot is fired against or close to the skin). So the skin around his wound would have been blistered by searing gases and spattered by hot soot and burning flecks of powder. The burns would have been serious and hundreds of flecks of burnt and partially burnt powder would still be embedded in his skin.

What if he shot himself through his clothing? If Vincent had pressed the gun's muzzle against his blouse, the edges of his wound would have been seared and blackened. There might or might not have been a wider area of tattooing, but his clothing would have been covered with soot.

None of this was described by the doctors or anyone else who looked at the wound or had contact with Vincent after the shooting.

Thus, the muzzle of the gun could not have been held against Vincent's side. The lack of powder tattooing or burns of any kind suggest the gun was at least twenty inches away when fired.

So Vincent van Gogh was mortally wounded in an atypical place for a suicide, by a gun that he couldn't possibly have held so far from his body.

We'll likely never know beyond any reasonable doubt what happened on that Sunday afternoon in France. Even if civil authorities could be convinced to exhume Vincent, there's very little to be learned about his death. Today he is probably just bones. A well-embalmed corpse in a lead coffin might have lasted more than one hundred years, but Vincent wasn't embalmed—typical in nineteenth-century Europe—and he was buried in a simple handmade wooden casket.

A forensic expert would likely find the small-caliber bullet that killed him, but without Ravoux's old revolver for comparison, even modern-day high-tech ballistics couldn't establish confidently that it fired the bullet. It might have come from any small pistol. And if all the soft tissues had decomposed, we couldn't determine the bullet's path or damage. We might end up with more questions than answers.

We all invest in things we believe to be true, often without any real evidence. Myth can be more magical than truth. Do you believe somebody other than Oswald killed Kennedy?

By and large, some in the art world resist the notion of a homicide, whether accidental or premeditated, because it's neither dramatic nor poetic enough. After all, painters, poets, and lonely lovers die so much more romantically if they drink from their own little poison vials, or cut their veins beneath a pale blue moon, or swim far out into the sea with no intention of swimming back.