Was Van Gogh Actually Murdered?

A new book says the facts don't point to Vincent van Gogh taking his own life.

Two American authors say that famed Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh didn't commit suicide, and was instead shot and killed by a neighbour's teenage brother. Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith's theory appears in their new book, Van Gogh: The Life, in which they contend that van Gogh had no idea how to use a gun and that there was no gun found near his remains, leading them to conclude that the impressionist couldn't have shot himself in the French town of Auvers-sur-Oise in 1890. The suicide theory has been accepted as fact since van Gogh's death, in which the impoverished, unappreciated, and increasingly mental ill artists allegedly shot himself in the chest with a revolver in a field, then stumbled about a mile to an inn, dying two days later in his brother Theo's arms. Instead, they say that van Gogh likely got into a confrontation with a teenager who had a history of picking on van Gogh that led to the artist getting fatally wounded. The researchers say van Gogh couldn't have walked that mile if he had shot himself, and that his claims of suicide seemed "half-hearted" at best. Naifeh and Smith contend that the trajectory of the bullet couldn't have occurred had van Gogh shot himself, and that there was no suicide note, something that seems out of sorts for an artists with a long history of correspondence. The Vincent van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam politely disagrees with this interpretation.