Yesterday was Vincent Van Gogh's birthday
Last edited Sat Mar 31, 2018, 03:48 PM - Edit history (1)
Vincent Willum van Goth (March 30, 1853 - July 29, 1890), was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art.
In just over a decade he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life.
As a young man he worked as an art dealer, often traveling, but became depressed after he was transfered to London.
He turned to religion, and spent time as a Protestant missionary in southern Belgium.
He drifted in ill health and solitude before taking up painting in 1881, having moved back home with his parents.
His younger brother, Theo, supported him financially, and the two kept up a long correspondence by letter.
Van Gogh suffered from psychotic episodes and delusions and though he worried about his mental stability, he often neglected his physical health, did not eat properly and drank heavily.
In 1886, he moved to Paris, where he met members of the avant-garde, including Emile Bernard and Paul Gauguin
His friendship with Paul Gauguin ended after a confrontation with a razor, when in a rage, he severed part of his own left ear.
He spent time in psychiatric hospitals, including a period at Saint-Remy.
After he discharged himself and moved to the Auberge Ravoux in Auvers-sur-Olse near Paris.
he came under the care of the homeopathic doctor Paul Gachet.
His depression continued and on 27 July 1890, Van Gogh shot himself in the chest with a revolver.
The bullet was deflected by a rib and passed through his chest without doing apparent damage to internal organs - probably stopped by his spine.
He was able to walk back to the Auberge Ravoux, where he was attended to by two doctors, but without a surgeon present the bullet could not be removed.
The doctors tended to him as best they could, then left him alone in his room, smoking his pipe.
The following morning Theo rushed to his brother's side, finding him in good spirits.
But within hours Vincent began to fail, suffering from an untreated infection resulting from the wound.
He died in the early hours of July 29.
According to Theo, Vincent's last words were, "the sadness will last forever."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_van_Gogh
"Was Van Gogh Killed? New Research Says He Was Shot"
According to the groundbreaking research of Pulitzer Prize winning biographers Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, the painter didn't shoot himself, he was killed.
In an article published in the December, 2014 issue of Vanity fair, Naifeh and White Smith claim that Van Gogh was accidentally shot by a man called Rene Secretan, who broke a lifetime of silence after seeing Vincent Minnelli's van Gogh biopic "Lust for Life" (1956), in which the painter is depicted as killing himself in the woods surrounding the French town of Auvers, just outside Paris.
Secretan confessed he had led a gang of teenage hoodlums who enjoyed getting drunk and bullying the tortured artist.
Although he never admitted to having shot van Gogh, Secretan did declare that he used to dress up as Buffalo Bill and brandish a malfunctioning pistol he got from the keeper of the Ravoux Inn, where the painter lived.
According to Naifeh and White Smith, two days before van Gogh's death, a stray bullet shot from afar hit the painter in the abdomen while he was out in the fields of Auvers.
Because it didn't hit his vital organs, it took over 29 agonizing hours to kill him.
None of the reports of his death mention the word suicide, only that he had "wounded himself."
No one admitted to having found the gun, and the doctors could not really make sense of his wounds.
To read more, Google:
"Was van Gogh Killed? New Research Says He Was Shot"
(December 2014 issue of Vanity Fair)
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