The Shot in the Wheat Field That History Still Cannot Agree On

Vincent van Gogh returned to the Auberge Ravoux in Auvers-sur-Oise on 27 July 1890 with a gunshot wound to his abdomen. He died two days later, aged 37. The account accepted for generations is that he shot himself in a nearby field; a later theory, advanced by two biographers, argues that another person may have fired the shot.

The suicide account is supported by statements attributed to Van Gogh and by the testimony of people close to him. His brother Theo hurried to his bedside, and painter Émile Bernard later described the death as deliberate. There was no autopsy or full forensic investigation, leaving later researchers with a limited record to interpret.

In 2011, biographers Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith proposed that René Secrétan, a local teenager who spent summers in Auvers, might have fired the fatal shot. They said Secrétan and other boys had teased Van Gogh and that Secrétan had access to a revolver. The theory attracted attention because it offered an alternative to suicide, but it has never been established by independent evidence placing Secrétan at the scene.

Those who question the traditional account point to the reported angle of the wound, the missing painting materials Van Gogh had taken to the fields, and signs that he had continued planning to paint. They argue these details leave room for an accidental shooting followed by a decision to protect the person responsible. Each is circumstantial, however, and none identifies a shooter.

Van Gogh Museum researchers Louis van Tilborgh and Teio Meedendorp challenged the murder theory in a 2013 essay in The Burlington Magazine. Their review of the surviving letters and testimony concluded that the evidence did not overturn the suicide account. The often-mentioned revolver later found in a field near Auvers cannot, by itself, establish who fired the shot or when.

The historical record therefore supports a distinction between what is broadly accepted and what remains debated. Van Gogh’s death is generally described as suicide, while the Secrétan theory remains a contested interpretation rather than a proven alternative. With no eyewitness account that resolves the shooting and no forensic investigation from 1890, the precise circumstances may never be known.