Did Van Gogh Shoot Himself? Auction of Pistol Reignites Debate.

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The pistol thought to be the one used by Van Gogh to shoot himself is on public display at Paris' Drouot auction house.
Credit: FRANCOIS GUILLOT/AFP/Getty Images
▼ The auction of a pistol said to have been used by the painter Vincent van Gogh to shoot himself has reignited a debate about who actually pulled the trigger: Did Van Gogh commit suicide, or was he shot by someone else?
The gun will be auctioned in France on Wednesday (June 19), where it's expected to sell for more than $50,000.
For years, most Van Gogh experts have accepted the explanation that he shot himself in the chest with a pistol in a suicide in July 1890.
Such a gun was found more than 70 years later, in a field near the French farming village of Auvers-sur-Oise where Van Gogh died, and it has widely been accepted as the weapon he used to shoot himself.
Van Gogh lived on for 30 hours before dying from the wound. His last words, according to his brother Theo, were "the sadness will last forever."
In the years since his death, the Dutch expressionist painter, who cut off his left earin a dispute with the painter Paul Gauguin has become the archetype of a despairing, suicidal artist overcome by depression.
But in 2011, biographers Gregory White Smith and Steven Naifeh argued that Van Gogh didn't shoot himself, but was shot accidentally by 16-year-old René Secrétan, who was spending the summer in the village.
According to their biography "Van Gogh: The Life" (Random House, 2011), Secrétan and his brother both befriended and bullied Van Gogh when he stayed at Auvers — and that Secrétan possessed the gun involved.
Based on a number of lingering mysteries about the last hours of Van Gogh's life, the authors proposed that the artist was shot during a scuffle with Secrétan; then, he implied that he had shot himself, in order to cover for the boys, they wrote in an essay in Vanity Fair.
The theory that Van Gogh was shot by another is disputed by some experts on the life of the artist. But Naifeh told Live Science that he was more convinced than ever that Secrétan shot Van Gogh.
Mystery weapon (▪ ▪ ▪)

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