Van Gogh Museum Says There's 'Not Enough Evidence' That the Artist's Death Was Anything But Suicide

Instead, they suggest that he was accidentally killed by two boys in the French village in which he lived, and pretended to have killed himself in order to protect them. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam — which gave the authors access to a trove of van Gogh's family letters — does not accept this theory, maintaining that suicide remains the most plausible explanation. Investigating the death of a mentally ill artist that occurred 121 years ago is challenging, to say the least. How does the evidence for each side stack up?

The theory, which the authors discussed with Morley Safer of "60 Minutes" last Sunday, is based on various aspects of Van Gogh's death. An oft-retold version of the story — immortalized by Kirk Douglas in the 1956 Technicolor melodrama "Lust for Life" — is that the artist was painting in a wheat field outside the French village of Auvers when he shot himself. Naifeh and Smith point out that the wheat field is a mile from town, and that it would have been very difficult to traverse this terrain with a bullet wound. Even more significantly, when van Gogh was examined by a doctor after the shooting, he was asked whether he tried to commit suicide, and replied, "I believe so." He is said to have added, "Don't accuse anybody else." The authors take this as evidence that he was hiding what actually happened.

Naifeh and Smith point to two teenaged brothers summering in the village as the real perpetrators. They played pranks on the loner artist and tormented him, taking him down to the riverside and caressing their girlfriends in front of him. They even had their girlfriends make mock advances to van Gogh, which embarrassed him to no end. One of the boys, René Secrétan, related this in a 1956 interview, and acknowledged borrowing a gun from the owner of the local café. He also stated, however, that van Gogh stole the gun from him and that he had left Auvers by the time the shooting occurred. Naifeh and Smith think that Vincent was shot when an encounter with the boys involving teasing gunplay ended tragically.