Van Gogh’s death: the wrong impression?

DID Vincent van Gogh cover up his own killing? That's what Pulitzer Prize-winning authors Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith have claimed, subverting the accepted wisdom that he committed suicide in a wheatfield more than 120 years ago.
 
The story told over the decades - and immortalised by Kirk Douglas in the 1956 movie Lust for Life - is that van Gogh was painting just outside the town of Auvers in northern France when he shot himself with a pistol. According to one biographer, the bullet hit his ribs, thus avoiding any major organs, and this allowed him to stagger back to the inn where he was staying, before dying 30 hours later.
 
But Naifeh and Smith question this version of events. "How did he get the gun?" Naifeh asked on the CBS show 60 Minutes last night. "Everybody in Auvers knew that he had been in an insane asylum. Pistols were a rarity in rural France. Who would've given Vincent van Gogh a gun?"
 
While the Dutch artist, famed for his impressionistic depictions of sunflowers and landscapes, was known to suffer from depression – and had already cut off his left ear in a fit of the blues - in his letters he always rejected the idea of suicide, concluding that such an act would be both sinful and immoral.
 
Further, Smith says, doctors at the time reported that the bullet entered at a "crazy angle", and that it was possible the gun had been held too far away for Vincent to have had his own hand on it. The gun and his painting supplies from that day have never been found.
 
Smith and Naifeh suggest instead that van Gogh was shot, probably by accident, by two teenaged brothers known to the painter who were playing cowboys.

When asked by police whether he had committed suicide, Vincent is said to have replied from his deathbed, "I believe so. Don't accuse anybody else... it is I who wanted to kill myself." Most agree that he greeted death willingly, relieved to no longer be a burden to his beloved brother, Theo.
 
Have Smith and Naifeh got a case for their theory? The first reaction of the art world is a big “Hmmm”. As the BBC's arts editor, Will Gompertz notes, so little is known about the event that there is "plenty of room for conjecture". ·