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Vincent van Gogh is a pop culture phenomenon. From college dorms to national museums, from immersive exhibitions to AI plugins, from priceless collections locked in airtight vaults to the aisles of TJ Maxx. His work is legendary. So is his biography. He depended on his brother. He cut off his ear and
and he died by suicide the year he sold his first painting. Or did he? In the early 2000s, two Pulitzer Prize-winning biographers made a shocking claim. The story the public believed for a century was wrong. Their evidence suggested Vincent did not shoot himself. He actually covered for the person who killed him, and he took the truth to his grave.
But when the biographers brought their findings to fellow experts, they were told, it wouldn't be good for your career if you talked about this. Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. New episodes come out every Wednesday. You can listen to the audio everywhere and watch the video only on Spotify. And be sure to check us out on Instagram at TheConspiracyPod.
This episode contains discussions of violence and suicide. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. If you or someone you know is struggling emotionally or feeling hopeless, visit Spotify.com slash resources. Stay with us.
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Before we dive into the major controversy, a minor one, the artist's name.
Depending on where you live, it's pronounced Van Gogh, Van Ho, Van Gogh, Van Goh, or whatever the speaker feels like. We'll stick with how he signed his paintings, Vincent. Though Vincent's work is wildly popular now, he didn't sell a painting until 1890 when he was 37.
The sale came after a review that was both glowing and insulting. According to scholar Stephen Nafy, the review essentially said, the greatest artist alive is this madman in the south of France. Within months of the sale, Vincent moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, a village outside Paris. He lived in the Aubert-Ravoux, an inn run by Arthur Gustave Ravoux.
In Auvers, he painted and he drank. The paintings were landscapes and portraits. The drink was absinthe. All of this was bankrolled by his younger brother, Theo, for the better part of a decade. Vincent used Theo's money to buy paint, pay rent, and even visit brothels. Theo worked as an art dealer, and in the weeks before Vincent's death, he contemplated spinning out his own business.
Besides Vincent, he had a new baby to support. Both brothers were feeling the winds of change. But in July 1890, they kept the status quo. That month, Vincent painted almost every day, including at least two portraits of his doctor, Paul Gachet. On July 27th, Vincent left the inn.
Later that day, he stumbled back with a gunshot wound in his abdomen and no gun in sight. Vincent trudged upstairs to his room and lay in bed while someone summoned Dr. Gachet. Unfortunately, the doctor's notes were not preserved. Neither were Dr. Mazary's, who Gachet brought in for a second opinion. Luckily, Dr. Gachet's son, Paul Gachet Jr., did write something down.
Paul described Vincent's wound as a small brownish-red circle with a purple-brown halo. The opening was pea-sized with no exit wound. The bullet was lodged near Vincent's spine. The gun used was a small caliber pistol pointed at an oblique angle, not head-on, and not touching Vincent's body. While the wound was painful, it seemed survivable.
Vincent was cogent, smoking, walking, even talking, but he provided zero explanation for how or why he'd been shot. Naturally, the gendarmes, the French authorities, came to investigate the next morning. According to witness accounts, they asked Vincent, did you want to commit suicide? He answered no.
Yes, I believe so, and added, Do not accuse anyone. It is I who wanted to kill myself. Dr. Gachet wrote to Vincent's brother, Theo, informing him Vincent has wounded himself. Theo traveled from Paris that day, July 28th. He sat with Vincent as he rested.
and there wasn't much the doctors could do. Both Dr. Gachet and Dr. Mazary deemed it unsafe to move Vincent to a hospital, and neither was a surgeon, so they weren't comfortable operating to remove the bullet. They dressed the wound and kept an eye on him. Without proper treatment, Vincent's wound grew infected. As day turned to night, he became less animated, going pale, and eventually struggling to breathe.
Just after midnight, about 29 hours after he was shot, Vincent died in Theo's arms. His death left limited records. No doctor's notes, no autopsy,
No cause of death on his death certificate. With so many holes in the story, witnesses, scholars, and filmmakers filled in details over the years, resulting in the historically accepted theory that Vincent intended to die by suicide.
The book Lust for Life and its film adaptation cemented those details in pop culture. But almost everyone agrees Lust for Life is inaccurate. In fact, one major witness only came forward with her version of events after the movie was released in 1956. Adeline Ravoux was the innkeeper's 13-year-old daughter.
and she knew Vincent in his final months. He even painted her, hoping to set the record straight. Adeline gave multiple interviews. Her account joined those of Vincent's 22-year-old mentee, Emile Bernard, and Paul Gachet Jr., the doctor's 17-year-old son. These accounts came out piecemeal, but put together, they told this story. Adeline said sometime in the weeks leading up to his death,
Vincent either borrowed or stole her father's pistol. Paul Jr. claimed that Vincent carried it about a kilometer out of town to the wheat field behind Chateau de la Rie, in the same area captured in his painting, Crows in Wheat Field. He sat down and took out the gun. The shock of the gunshot knocked Vincent unconscious. Hours later, the cool evening air woke Vincent up
Leaving the gun behind, he stumbled back to the inn where he died. When Theo arranged for Vincent's funeral, the church refused to hold a ceremony, let them use its hearse, or bury Vincent in their graveyard. This was normal protocol for suicide victims back then.
much less was known about mental health and suicide. After the funeral, Vincent's mentee, Emile Bernard, wrote a letter to an art critic saying Theo told him, quote, "Vincent's suicide had been absolutely deliberate in that he had done it in complete lucidity." Historians took his word for it, perhaps because of Vincent's mental health history.
You've probably heard that Vincent cut off his own ear and presented it to an unrequited love, but that's more of an urban legend. The reality is more complex.
Instances of self-harm usually have multiple causes. Experts agree it can stem from a mix of emotional, psychological, and even neurological factors. Research out of Cornell University found that a history of self-harm doesn't prove suicidal intent or explain later events. It just shows that Vincent's mental health was suffering. Second, that unrequited love
It might not have existed. Some biographers assert the ear incident was actually spurred by his tense relationship with painter and sculptor Paul Gauguin in 1888. Two years before he died, Vincent hoped to form an artist colony. He invited fellow painters to live with him in what he called the Yellow House. Gauguin was the only taker.
After Theo bribed him, the two artists disagreed on everything. Budgets, models, home decor, an unflattering portrait Gauguin painted of Vincent. It goes on. After two months, Gauguin told Vincent he was moving out. Gauguin stepped out that evening, presumably going to a brothel.
It's unclear what transpired next, but the night culminated in Vincent presenting a bloody handkerchief to the woman at the brothel's front door. Inside was part of his ear. Supposedly, he wanted her to give it to Gauguin, saying, "Remember me." Gauguin left anyway. Shortly after, Vincent was diagnosed with epilepsy. Today, most people think it was temporal lobe epilepsy,
Temporal lobe epilepsy seizures can cause hallucinations, erratic behavior, and memory loss. It's possible Vincent had a seizure and woke up with no ear and no memory of the night before. And shortly after this, Vincent voluntarily checked into the asylum of Saint-Paul de Marceau. That's where he painted The Starry Night, one of his most famous works.
It's also where he experienced suicidal ideation, though he wrote in letters that he believed it was immoral. Like many people, his thoughts around life and death seemed to shift over time. Three months after checking out of the hospital and moving to Auvers, Vincent died. Decades later, in 1960, a farmer unearthed a gun in a field near the Auvers-Ravoux. The make and model lined up with both the time period
and Vincent's wound. It seemed like the gun. So for a hundred years, suicide was the accepted truth. But in 2011, a new theory rocked the art world. As Van Gogh expert Martin Bailey wrote, "A few years ago, the question I was most often asked about Vincent Van Gogh was, why did he cut off his ear? Now it's, did he commit suicide
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To find your next pair of glasses, sunglasses, or contact lenses, or to find the Warby Parker store nearest you, head over to warbyparker.com. That's warbyparker.com. Over 100 years after Vincent Van Gogh's death, art historians Stephen Nafee and Gregory White Smith decided to profile Vincent. They'd previously won a Pulitzer for their biography of Jackson Pollock, so they knew what they were doing.
The authors spent a full decade in primary source documents. They even scored an invite to the Van Gogh Museum's private vault, where they got to see Vincent's letters firsthand. They peered deep into his life and concluded that history got his death all wrong. First off, the authors believed none of the three key witnesses could be completely trusted.
Each had something to gain. Remember Vincent's teenage mentee, Emile Bernard, the one who wrote that Vincent intended to end his life? This wasn't the first time he'd written about Vincent. According to Nafee and White-Smith, Emile previously penned an overdramatic and heavily fabricated account of the ear incident. Plus, everything Bernard reported was secondhand. He didn't arrive in Auvers until Vincent's funeral.
Even in discussing the funeral, his statements contradicted themselves. Next, Paul Gachet Jr., the doctor's son who provided the location for Vincent's deadly injury. This information comes from a 1904 painting Paul made, a landscape of a wheat field behind the Chateau de la Rie in Auvers. On the back, he labeled it, "The place where Vincent committed suicide."
in the wheat field Paul Jr. painted, was over a mile away from the Aubert-Ravoux, Nafee and Whitesmith didn't believe Vincent would have been able to walk that far with a gunshot wound alone. They proposed Vincent was shot elsewhere and found research to back it up. In the years after Vincent's death, other locals slowly came forward with reports
One saw Vincent in a farmyard near a quote "dunghill." One classified the area as "farm off rue Boucher," and another heard gunfire in the same area. To top it off, Vincent's nephew said Paul Gachet Jr. was quote "highly unreliable," possibly because Paul played up his proximity to Vincent to kickstart his own career.
Paul Jr. might have referenced Vincent in his own painting's title to grab attention, regardless of the truth. The third account Nafee and Whitesmith questioned was Adeline Ravouz. She explained the source of the gun. Notably, it took her 70 years to admit the gun belonged to her dad. People asked about the gun as soon as Vincent was shot. Why keep it secret for so long?
Well, when she finally talked, Adeline was in her 80s, so perhaps it was a deathbed confession. However, Nafee and Whitesmith found her accounts inconsistent and filled with hearsay. Understandable, considering she was only 13 when Vincent died, and like the Gachets, the Ravous turned their Vincent connection into fame and money. This all left Nafee and Whitesmith scratching their heads.
Why did Vincent bleed so little if he laid unconscious for hours? How could he get home alone with that wound? Why weren't the medical records preserved when so much of Vincent's ephemera was? At some point, the authors came across Wilford Neal's Arnold's 1992 book, Vincent Van Gogh,
chemicals, crises, and creativity. Arnold suggested that Vincent shot himself accidentally during a temporal lobe epilepsy seizure. Vincent's seizures happened roughly every three or four months, and by late July 1890, it had been close to three months since his last seizure. This could explain Vincent's confusion and his seemingly non-lethal wound.
Also why Vincent believed he shot himself and didn't want anyone else taking the blame. He couldn't remember what happened. Nafee and Whitesmith claimed that when Vincent was shot, people initially saw it as an accident. Both Vincent's brother Theo and Dr. Gachet used that exact word. They wrote Vincent was the victim of a quote, accident. The only letter that says suicide is Emile Bernard's.
The authors also suggest that the church's refusal to host Vincent's funeral wasn't necessarily due to suicide. They noted there was no stated reason, and it was equally likely they wouldn't bury him because the church was Catholic, and Vincent was a foreign Protestant. But that left Nafee and Whitesmith wondering, if it was an accident, why would Vincent have a gun? To kill birds, as shown in Lust for Life?
to paint it in a still life? To face someone in a duel? More importantly, why wasn't the wound consistent with a self-inflicted gunshot? Then, the authors heard a rumor that changed everything. Back in the 1930s, art historian John Riewold visited Auvers and heard that Vincent was shot by young boys.
To Nafee and Whitesmith, that was the final puzzle piece. That was why none of the accounts lined up. Vincent was shot by someone else and a willing participant in the cover-up. Putting together their findings, Nafee and Whitesmith published their book...
In a final appendix, they proposed a new story. In the summer of 1890, things were looking up for Vincent. He'd earned recognition in the art world. He was extremely productive and his paintings were good. His brother Theo had even named his firstborn son after him, baby Vincent. A huge honor and a sign of the closeness Vincent always longed for. Over the years,
Vincent constantly tried to make friends, striking up correspondence and seeking like-minded artists like Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard. But those same artists said Vincent was difficult. He'd led a deeply lonely life. But now he had a new nephew and he'd even made a new friend in town, an artsy young Parisian named Gaston Secretan.
Vincent was thrilled. He'd tracked down Gaston in the village to chat, and the pair had great discussions about art. Gaston was only 18, so Vincent might have seen it as another mentor relationship. The trouble was, Gaston didn't come to Auvers alone. He summered in his father's villa with his parents and siblings.
including his little brother, 16-year-old René Secretan. René was his brother's opposite. Mischievous, adventurous, athletic, got the girl straight from the Moulin Rouge. Though he grew up in Paris, René idolized the American Wild West. He dressed like Buffalo Bill and even carried a .38 pistol. A pistol the wannabe cowboy took home.
from the Aubergé Ravoux by his own admission. In a later interview, he made one thing clear. He never returned the gun. And yes, this is the same gun that allegedly shot Vincent. Unlike his brother, René couldn't care less about art. So when he saw Gaston hanging around Vincent, he didn't see one of the greatest artists of all time. He saw a weird loner.
Rene and his cronies spent the summer sneaking snakes into Vincent's paint box, slipping salt into his coffee, and sprinkling chili pepper on his brushes. Vincent was known to suck on the tips when he was deep in thought. At every scare and spit take, Rene and his friends watched and laughed. For weeks, Vincent turned the other cheek, ignoring the pranks and even hanging out with the group at the local bar.
Perhaps because René always paid for everyone's drinks, and definitely because Gaston was Vincent's only friend in Auvers. Vincent may have even sketched René. Throughout his career, Vincent struggled to convince models to sit for him, so a willing model may have been worth some salt in his coffee. This all came to a head on July 27th, 1890.
That day, Vincent packed up his easel and brushes and went out to paint. One account the authors uncovered said Vincent walked along the quote, "road to Secretan family villa," not far from the fishing hole and local bar René and Gaston frequented. At some point, Vincent encountered the brothers. Some or all of the trio may have been inebriated.
Nafee and Whitesmith theorize a few things could have happened next. Maybe Rene heckled Vincent. Perhaps he even aimed his gun toward Vincent as a joke, or he aimed to shoot nearby to show off and scare him. Maybe Rene pulled another prank, and Vincent's temper finally came out. Rene later said Vincent once turned red with anger and wanted to kill everyone. Perhaps Rene unsheathed his pistol in self-defense.
He called himself trigger-happy, or maybe Vincent tried to take the pistol from René. Somehow, the gun fired. Even if René shot on accident, he could be charged criminally for injuring Vincent or killing him. So everybody panicked. In the chaos, they split up. The Secretan brothers stayed behind, cleaning up the scene and perhaps burying the gun.
Since he was only about half a mile from the inn, Vincent could return easily, especially if Gaston helped him part of the way back.
Cafe patrons on the inn's terrace saw him stumble inside alone, clutching his abdomen without any art supplies. Vincent appeared confused and asked for help like he was the victim of an accident. That night, Vincent mulled over what he'd say when the gendarmes inevitably arrived. He, quote, chose to protect the boys as a final act of martyrdom.
Nafee and Whitesmith suggest it was because Vincent was at peace with dying. But to our team, it makes more sense if he wasn't protecting Renee, but Gaston. Most people would intervene if their friend and their brother got in a fight.
Assuming he was present, Gaston could have grabbed the gun from Renee or Vincent, accidentally causing it to go off. Remember, the local rumor was shot by some boys, not shot by a boy. Vincent longed for an intimate relationship his entire life and never quite achieved it.
His two closest relationships were with his brother Theo, which had an air of family obligation, and with a sex worker, which was transactional. He was used to being friendless, alone, and mocked. It's natural to think he'd protect his only friend in Auvers. To Nafee and Whitesmith,
The theory that Vincent protected the brothers explains why Vincent's answers were, quote, oddly hedged. In their full review of his letters, the authors found this in character for Vincent. He lied all the time. Throughout their biography, they demonstrated how he concealed the truth, stretched it, fibbed, and manipulated people to get what he wanted, mostly money from Theo. In a memorable incident,
Vincent asked Theo to lie on his behalf. During the time he lived with Gauguin, he felt insecure about never having sold a painting. So he asked Theo to start telling people Vincent's works were too precious and dear for him to ever give one up. Nafee and Whitesmith also describe Vincent's martyr tendencies. When he briefly attempted a career as a pastor,
Vincent dressed in rags, restricted his food, and neglected to heat the shack he moved into. He wasn't impoverished. His family offered him money and urged him to think of his health, but Vincent was the type who'd risk frostbite to show his devotion. With this in mind, it's easier to see how Vincent might have covered for the Secretan brothers, even as his wound brought him closer to death.
and he may not have been the only one concealing the truth.
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When authors Stephen Nafee and Gregory Whitesmith proposed that Vincent covered up who fired the gun that killed him, they quickly realized he couldn't have been the lone secret keeper. Obviously, René and Gaston Secretan would have been complicit,
But so would the innkeeper, Gustave Ravoux. René confessed to carrying Gustave Ravoux's gun around all summer. Now, Ravoux probably wouldn't admit to giving a prankster teen a gun. And admitting to a theft at the inn he ran wasn't a great look either. It made sense to keep quiet. Especially because the Secretan family were big spenders at the inn's café...
His silence would ensure their continued business. That summer, the Secretan family returned to Paris unusually early, in the middle of the season, and they returned to Auvers in subsequent years, but René was never seen with a gun again. He and his brother Gaston went on to live full, successful lives. Gaston became a singer-songwriter, and René was a businessman and shooting champion.
If Vincent did cover up his own killing to protect the boys, he succeeded. But any secrets around Vincent faced a major challenge. His growing fame
That's what brought John Riewoldt to Auvers, where he heard the rumors. And that's what brought René Secretan to finally give interviews at age 82. Like Adeline Ravoux, he saw Lust for Life and wanted to set the record straight. René contacted French writer Victor Doiteau and spoke to him several times during 1956 and 1957.
the final two years of René's life. Like Adeline, his account resembled a deathbed confession. He described bullying Vincent and using Ravoux's gun, which he said, often misfired. However, René upheld the story that Vincent shot himself. René told Doiteau, quote, we used to leave the gun around with all our fishing gear, and that's where Vincent found and took it.
Like in the other accounts, Nafee and Whitesmith found contradictions, which they saw as evidence of a cover-up. For example, René said Vincent shot himself after the secretans left town, but then said Vincent stole the gun the same day he was wounded. René claimed he always had the gun with him, but didn't notice it missing until after Vincent died.
He also said he learned of Vincent's death from a Parisian newspaper, but no Paris newspaper reported it. Reading the interview, Nafee and Whitesmith couldn't ignore their sneaking suspicion. And as they wrote in Vanity Fair, they weren't the first. Quote,
We found out later that another museum researcher had already expressed his own suspicions about the suicide story. In 2006, he brought them to the attention of a senior official who advised him to abandon that line of inquiry as too controversial. And when they brought up the idea to experts at the Van Gogh Museum, one agreed it was believable but said...
The biggest problem you'll find after publishing your theory is that the suicide is more or less printed in the brains of past and present generations and has become a sort of self-evident truth. Vincent's suicide has become the grand finale of the story of the martyr for art. It's his crown of thorns.
Nafee and Whitesmith published the theory anyway, in their 2011 book, Van Gogh, The Life. Once the book was out, the critiques flew in. In their Vanity Fair article, Nafee and Whitesmith wrote that the art world didn't just disagree with our new reading, they were enraged by it. One expert called them just dead wrong.
and another was so choked with indignation that he refused even to discuss the subject. In 2013, senior researchers at the Van Gogh Museum, Louis Van Tilburg and Theo Maidendorp, published a takedown. They attacked Nafee and Whitesmith's understanding of ballistics, insisting it was possible for Vincent to shoot himself.
They accused the authors of misinterpreting the French descriptions of Vincent's wound, and they noted a translation error. The gunshot was described in French as "too low and too far out." Nafee and Whitesmith understood that to mean "too low and too far out" for Vincent to have shot the gun. Van Tilburg and Maidendorp said it meant the shot was "too low and too far out" to hit vital organs.
In response, Nafee and Whitesmith teamed up with a ballistics expert, Dr. Vincent DeMeo, for further analysis. In 2014, they published a response to the Van Gogh Museum researchers, including DeMeo's findings. DeMeo said the way Vincent needed to hold the gun for this shot was too awkward to be intentional.
and the shooter would have been covered in gunpowder, but no account mentions gunpowder on Vincent's arm or clothes.
Meanwhile, Nafee and White-Smith said the Dutch scholars referenced a self-published work that contradicted eyewitness testimony, neglected to name a sighted ballistics expert, and ignored questions around the gun found in 1960. Speaking to Live Science, Nafee called out his issues with this gun, saying no forensics tie it to Vincent.
But the controversy continues. In 2021, another book was published heavily promoting the suicide theory, Van Gogh's Finale by Martin Bailey. He's a respected scholar with a regular column on Vincent for the art newspaper. Like Nafee and Whitesmith, Bailey intensely analyzed Vincent's letters and the primary source documents.
but he largely debunks their version of events. Bailey agreed René Secretan's account contained lies, noting René said Vincent "had given him and his brother six paintings" and that would mean that these 16-year-old tykes received almost as many works as Van Gogh's friend Roulin. In his eyes, that put René's entire interview under suspicion.
Bailey also asserted that Vincent could have bought his own gun. He supplied the account of a man who claims his great-grandfather sold one to Vincent. And finally, he detailed how Vincent showed multiple potential risk factors for suicide, including expressing suicidal thoughts, recent major life changes, and family history. As of 2025,
People still debate who shot Vincent. But maybe the better question isn't who held the gun, but why it matters. Talking about the biography, Stephen Nafee quoted French writer Emile Zola. The man behind the canvas is as important as what's on the canvas. Basically, knowing Vincent's experience allows us to connect more deeply with his work.
The suicide story paints Vincent as a tortured artist, a common archetype. Easy to understand, easy to sell, but it doesn't reflect who he was as a person. Meanwhile, the self-sacrifice tale echoes who Vincent was throughout his life. Nafee and Whitesmith present his death as the final act of a man who yearned for companionship and died to preserve it.
The self-sacrifice isn't as easy to understand, but it makes you think. And isn't that what art's supposed to do? Thank you for tuning in to Conspiracy Theories. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at TheConspiracyPod. If you're watching on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts.
For more information on Vincent van Gogh, amongst the many sources we used, we found Van Gogh The Life by Stephen Nafee and Gregory White Smith, and Van Gogh's Finale by Martin Bailey extremely helpful to our research. We'd also like to thank the Jed Foundation for their help with this sensitive topic.
If you or someone you know is struggling emotionally or feeling hopeless, visit Spotify.com slash resources. Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story and the official story isn't always the truth. This episode was written and researched by Maggie Admire.
Edited by Mickey Taylor. Fact-checked by Laurie Siegel. Engineered by Marcelino Ortiz. And video edited and sound designed by Ryan Contra. I'm your host, Carter Roy.