Vincent Van Gogh was murdered, says new biography

Vincent Van Gogh may not have committed suicide, say the Pulitzer Prizewinning authors of "Van Gogh: The Life"

Instead, the authors claim that Van Gogh was shot by a teenager who had a Wild West obsession and a faulty gun, reports the Australian.

While, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith both accept that no one knows what happened, they argue an alternate series of events took place in Auvers-sur-Oise, France on July 27, 1890, one that makes far more sense than the accepted account, reports the New York Times. Their argument is located in the appendix of their 900-page book.  

They also believe that the way in which Van Gogh died contributed to his meteoric rise to fame after his death. According to the authors, Van Gogh found his way back to the inn at which he was staying with a gunshot wound in his chest, more than a mile away.

30 hours later, he died- but not before he was asked if had meant to commit suicide. However, Naifeh and Smith argue that this doesn't jibe with his thoughts on suicide, which he described in letters as a "cowardly act." Nor does this explain why a gun and the easel and brushes he had taken into the field were never found.

The boy who allegedly fired the gun was named Rene Secretan. Secretan, a 16-year-old was spending the summer at a nearby villa, and liked to wear a cowboy costume which he accessorized with a real .380 caliber pistol.

The book is out later in the week.

According to the Australian:

Smith spent a year and a half reading Van Gogh's letters "ten hours a day, six or seven days a week, almost like a Talmudic scholar" while Naifeh skimmed two to three books a day for relevance to Van Gogh, including reading every book that he might have read himself.

Leo Jansen, curator of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, has called the book "the definitive biography for decades to come" while Ann Dumas, who curated last year's Royal Academy show Van Gogh: The Artist and his Letters, described it as "an amazing tour de force".