FEW ARTISTS HAVE been the subject of so much research as Vincent Van Gogh, the Dutch painter who died in 1890 from a gunshot wound. While his nearly 900 paintings, completed over nine years (beginning in 1881), have provided the lion’s share of research on the great artist, his personal life has drawn equal attention.
Clearly, Van Gogh was a driven, and probably troubled, soul. The question is why this was so. Two views have shaped the answers, one entirely psychological and the other religious. Van Gogh’s multitude of letters to his brother Theo have been a rich, if enigmatic, resource for the experts to try to understand his motives and internal life.
To state the simplest view, Van Gogh was simply a “genius-madman,” as one art historian puts the case. This would explain why Van Gogh, for the thirty-seven years of his life, had erratic behavior, was considered insane by his family, would spend a few stints in mental clinics, had no close friends, and would maim himself, as illustrated by the cut he inflicted on his ear.
This might be called the psychiatric view of Van Gogh, and it has had its advocates, especially in the age when Freudian and medical interpretations of artists had become popular. In more recent decades, however, the religious background of the artist, and the cause of his death, have been reconsidered. And some interesting theses have arisen.
Van Gogh was indisputably a product of the religious world of his upbringing in Holland. He had clergy in the family, and he himself began his worldly career as a missionary, working for a branch of Methodism in England and continental Europe. In one view, he rejected that past, and dove into art, now a skeptic, libertine, and modernist.
By contrast, other biographer say that his religious roots ran so deep, that they shaped his entire life. Here, Van Gogh did not abandon religion, but modified his belief system. He was well read and cognizant of current theological trends. He read, for example, Ernest Renan’s controversial Life of Jesus (1863), the work that started serious biblical and historical criticism, taking Jesus to be a man and the beliefs about him products of his later followers.
Van Gogh also was familiar with the inroads of Asian religion taking place in France. He not only collected Japanese prints, but may have become familiar with Buddhist ideas, among others. He was a thinking man.
The East-West synthesis may have informed his personal beliefs, this leavening his artistic vision. This is the view of biographer Kathleen Powers Erickson in her book At Eternity's Gate: The Spiritual Vision of Vincent Van Gogh (1998). The argument here is that Van Gogh was sane, but suffered a kind of epilepsy that, while no producing seizures, caused him one to black out. In this kind of ailment, the subject feels an “electric storm in the brain” before the blackout, going far to explain Van Gogh’s constant anxiety—and why others deemed him crazy. (Others have theorized he had schizophrenia or a bi-polar condition).
In the above view, Van Gogh, while dealing with epilepsy, had otherwise transferred his youthful religious zeal into a passion to created beauty in a universe overseen by God.
If so, then what about the theory that he shot himself, a lunge into suicide? One team of researchers has explained the shooting as an accident, again, freeing up our image of Van Gogh to be a tragic figure, not a suicidal one.
The accident thesis was novel enough that the authors of the book Van Gogh: The Life (1994, 976 pages!), Steve Naifeh and Greg Smith, appeared on the CBS’s investigative magazine “60 Minutes.”
Years of research, gathering new evidence, and making visits to the town of Van Gogh’s final days, the authors argued that two youth in the town constantly taunted the odd-looking Van Gogh on the streets around of the vacation town of Auvers, as daily he set out to paint in the fields. In the suicide theory, Van Gogh shot himself with a gun he borrowed to fire and scare away crows that disturbed his painting.
However, the authors argue that the two boys liked to play cowboys, and they had a pistol of their own. “Was it playing cowboy in some way that went awry?” Naifeh asked. Or, “Was it teasing with the gun with Vincent lunging out?”
Whatever the case, this scenario can explain two things from the police and medical reports. When the police asked Van Gogh if he had tried to commit suicide, he said two things: “Yes, I believe so,” and then added, “Don’t accuse anyone else.” Second, the doctor’s medical report noted that the wound suggested a gun aimed at an odd angle some distance from the flesh.
In all, the accounts proposed by the two areas of scholarship noted above (by Erickson and Naifeh/Smith), provides a truly tragic view of the artist: burdened by epilepsy, he was nevertheless both rational and theologically sophisticated, and endowed with an admirably dedication to make paintings.
That was brought to an end by a fatal accident, in this view, not suicidal tendencies. And to suggest Van Gogh’s benign outlook on his fellow human beings, he did not want to tell the police that the boys, in some kind of wrangle, shot him. After seeing a doctor, Van Gogh died 30 hours later.
Said Naifeh, “A couple of kids had shot Vincent van Gogh and he decided to basically protect them and accept this as the way to die.” After that, the painter was forgotten, then revived in the modern art market, and soon the Van Gogh mythology was born. He surely has deserved the admiration that followed.