The famous painter died 29 hours after taking a bullet to the abdomen in a wheat field near Paris in 1890. On his death bed he supposedly revealed that he had shot himself Now, forensic evidence brings this detail into question.
Doubt about the claim that Van Gogh killed himself seems to have first originated from art historian John Rewald, who spoke of hearing local rumours about such a theory in the 1930s. The claim gained weight when it was supported by a 960 page biography of Van Gogh by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, published in 2011. At the time of the 2013 Independent article linked in the last sentence, there was no still no evidence to back up the claims, and the suicide theory was quoted in the article as being“eminently defensible, both psychologically and historically”.
Now, a gunshot wounds expert (Vincent di Maio, pathologist) has stated that suicide doesn’t make sense if you examine the wound and available evidence. The wounds apparently had a “brown and purple halo around [it].” Noting that bruising (purple) means absolutely nothing and is common in incidents where the person shot does not die directly from the wound (living awhile afterwards), he goes to explain that the brown is only seen in entrance wounds in which the victim was at least a meter from the weapon. Maio explains that a self-inflicted gunshot wound is characterized by “soot, powder tattooing and searing of the skin around the entrance,” which was lacking with Van Gogh.
Independent verification will be needed before this can be declared as a fact, the evidence seems to benefit the murder theory. Maio states: “that, in all medical probability, the wound incurred by Van Gogh was not self-inflicted. In other words, he did not shoot himself.” What this means, and who could have done it, remain unanswered questions. Although Naifeh and Smith proposed that he was shot by a 16-year-old schoolboy (the one quoted as remembering him having said he committed suicide: Paul Junior) I think this is probably not the only sound theory, and the evidence seems to say: Van Gogh was murdered.