July 29, 1890: Vincent van Gogh Dies By Suicide

The only known photograph of him

July 29, 1890: Vincent van Gogh dies in Auvers-sur-Oise, France, 2 days after shooting himself in the chest. He was only 37 years old.

Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853 in Zundert, the Netherlands, near Breda, and only 2 miles from the border with Belgium. He began drawing at an early age, and briefly served as a Protestant missionary in Belgium. In 1886, he moved to Paris, where he fell in with a group of artists rebelling against the Impressionist phase of art, including Paul Gauguin.

He had long suffered from depression, and began to have psychotic episodes. He seemed to subsist on alcohol, cigarettes and coffee. In 1888, he moved to Arles, in the south of France, about halfway between Montpellier and Marseille. It was there that he created his greatest works, including the flower paintings Irises and Sunflowers.

Jeanne Calment, the Frenchwoman born in 1875 and died in 1997, at age 122 the oldest authenticated person in human history, claimed to have met Vincent van Gogh in Arles in 1888. She said he was "ugly" and "disagreeable," and "reeked of alcohol."

On December 23, 1888, he and Gauguin, rooming together in Arles, had another in a series of arguments. Gauguin later claimed that van Gogh came at him with a straight razor. The next morning, a policeman came to the hotel, and found van Gogh unconscious, with blood everywhere. Most of his left ear had been cut off. He was taken to a hospital, and, since he had no memory of how he lost his ear, he was committed. He was released on January 7, 1889.

The traditional story is that he cut the ear off with a razor -- probably the same one Gauguin said van Gogh threatened him with -- in the middle of a psychotic attack. It has also been suggested that, also being a tempestuous personality, Gauguin challenged him to a duel with swords, and Gauguin himself cut the ear off. van Gogh painted at least 2 self-portraits with the ear bandaged, although both show the bandage on the right side, not the left. He may have been looking in a mirror while he painted.

His mental health remained precarious, and, on May 8, 1889, he was taken to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum, a former monastery in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, 15 miles northeast of Arles. There, he painted many scenes of the interior of the hospital, scenes from its gardens including Lilacs, and, looking through his bedroom window, what became his best-known work, The Starry Night.

van Gogh did not think much of The Starry Night: In a letter to Émile Bernard, also a member of the "Post-Impressionist" group that included van Gogh and Gauguin, he wrote, "I allowed myself to be led astray into reaching for stars that are too big -- another failure -- and I have had my fill of that."

In March 1890, while he was at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, his painting The Red Vineyard was sold at an auction in Brussels, Belgium, for 400 francs -- in 2022 American money, about $2,646. It would be the only one of his paintings to sell while he lived. It is now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, along with some of his other paintings.

He left the monastery/asylum in May 1890, and moved to the Auberge Ravoux in Auvers-sur-Oise, about 20 miles northwest of Paris, to be closer to his younger brother Theo, an art dealer who had long supported him financially, and Theo's family. But he couldn't escape his depression, and, on July 27, he took a 7-millimeter Lefaucheux pinfire revolver, and shot himself in the chest.

He was able to walk back to the Ravoux, and the doctors determined that they could not remove the bullet, but also that he did not seem to be in immediate danger. Theo arrived on the morning of the 28th, and, he later wrote to others, found him in good spirits. But while the bullet hadn't hit any major organs, the wound had become infected, and he died in the middle of the night on the 29th. Theo wrote that Vincent's last words were, "The sadness will live forever."

He was buried the next day, in the Auvers-sur-Oise cemetery. Theo suffered from a brain infection, and died only 6 months later, on January 25, 1891, at 33. He was buried in Utrecht, the Netherlands. In 1914, Theo's coffin was exhumed, and buried next to Vincent's.

Theo had saved the letters that Vincent wrote him, and that's how we know of Vincent's feelings about things, including his own work and that of other painters. In 1914, the same year that Theo's widow Johanna had his body moved next to Vincent's, she had the letters published, and Vincent's posthumous reputation grew from this. She married again, was widowed again, and died in 1925.

Vincent never married, although he seemed to have fallen in love with a first cousin, with the family preventing the marriage, not because of the close relationship, but because he wouldn't be able to support her. Although he was accused (without proof) of forcing himself on one of his models and fathering her child, he is not known to have had any children.

Theo's line does continue. One of his grandsons, also named Theo, became a Dutch resistance fighter who was captured and executed by the Nazis. His brother named his son, the original Theo's great-grandson, after him, and this Theo van Gogh became a film director. After directing Submission: Part 1, which strongly criticized the treatment of women in Islam, in 2004, he was assassinated by a Muslim extremist.

In 1934, Irving Stone wrote Lust for Life, a novel imagining the relationship between Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. In 1956, director Vincente Minnelli (ex-husband of Judy Garland and father of Liza Minnelli) made a film version of it, starring Kirk Douglas as van Gogh and Anthony Quinn as Gauguin, the latter winning an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the role. James Donald played Theo.

In 1990, on the 100th Anniversary of Vincent's death, the film Vincent & Theo premiered, with the brothers played by English actor Tim Roth and Welsh actor Paul Rhys, respectively. The same year, Japanese director Akira Kurosawa released Dreams, and cast another legendary director, Martin Scorcese, as van Gogh. In 1991, Jacques Dutronc played him in Vincent, and won the French equivalent of the Oscar, the César, for the role.

On a 2010 episode of Doctor Who, van Gogh was played by Scottish actor Tony Curran. In the 2018 film At Eternity's Gate, which suggests that his death was an accident, caused by a gunshot among children at play, he was played by Willem Dafoe.

In 1971, on his album American Pie, Don McLean included a song titled "Vincent," with each of 3 verses beginning with the words, "Starry, starry night." Regarding his treatment by others at the time, McLean wrote, "They did not listen. They did not know how. Perhaps they'll listen now." He wrote of the suicide in the bridge, and moved on to a last verse where people go to museums and look at the art, without thinking of the artist: "They would not listen. They're not listening still. Perhaps they never will."

Since 1941, The Starry Night has been on display at the Museum of Modern Art, at 11 W. 53rd Street in Midtown Manhattan.

The author of this blog, with The Starry Night at MoMA, March 23, 2022.

This was 2 years after the COVID outbreak,

and the museum was still insisting on masks.

*

July 29, 1890 was a Tuesday. It was the year of the Players' League revolt in baseball, 1 of only 4 seasons -- 1884, 1914 and 1915 being the others -- that what we now call Major League Baseball had 3 leagues.

In the National League:

* The Brooklyn Bridegrooms beat the Cleveland Spiders, 12-3 at National League Park in Cleveland. This ballpark was replaced by a new League Park in 1891, which was replaced by another League Park in 1910, which became home of the team that became the Cleveland Indians until 1946. The Spiders folded after the 1899 season, by which point the Bridegrooms -- so named because several players got married in the 1887-88 off-season -- had become the Superbas. In 1911, they became the Dodgers.

* The Chicago Colts beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 8-6 at West Side Park in Chicago. The Colts became the Cubs in 1903.

* The Cincinnati Reds beat the Boston Beaneaters, 11-3 at League Park in Cincinnati. The Beaneaters became the Braves in 1912.

* The New York Giants were supposed to play the Pittsburgh Pirates at Recreation Park in Pittsburgh, but the game was rained out. It was rescheduled for September 22, and for some reason was played 60 miles to the southwest, in Wheeling, West Virginia. The Giants won, 8-3.

In the American Association:

* The Philadelphia Athletics beat the Toledo Maumees, 7-0 at the Jefferson Street Grounds in Philadelphia. Both of these teams folded with the AA after 1 more season. This Philadelphia team wasn't the 1st to be named the Athletics, and it wouldn't be the last. As you'll see in a moment, it wasn't even the only one at the time.

* The St. Louis Browns beat the Syracuse Stars, 5-3 at Star Park in Syracuse, New York. The Stars were among the losers in the "Players' League War," and folded after the season. Syracuse previously had a team called the Stars in the NL in 1879. These are, to date, the only 2 seasons in MLB for the city.

* The Rochester Broncos beat the Louisville Colonels, 6-3 at Culver Field in Rochester, New York. This would be the only season in MLB for Rochester. The Colonels would join the NL in 1892, after the AA folded, but would fold themselves after the 1899 season.

* The Brooklyn Gladiators and the Columbus Solons appear not to have been scheduled. The Gladiators finished a distant last in the AA, and folded after the season. In contrast, the Solons finished 2nd in the AA, albeit 10 games behind the Colonels, but still lost money, and folded with the league after the 1891 season.

In the Players' League, none of those teams survived its folding after the season:

* The Brooklyn Ward's Wonders lost to the Chicago Pirates, 8-3 at South Side Park in Chicago. This is not the same South Side Park that would later be the 1st home of the American League's Chicago White Sox and the Negro Leagues' Chicago American Giants. The Brooklyn team was named after their star shortstop, the PL's founder, John Montgomery Ward.

* The PL's version of the Philadelphia Athletics beat the Buffalo Bisons, 9-3 at Olympic Park in Buffalo. Although the names of each of these teams would be applied to later teams, these teams died with the PL.

* The Cleveland Infants beat the Boston Reds, 17-6 at Brotherhood Park in Cleveland. I can find no record of why the Cleveland team was called the Infants. Maybe they wanted to emphasize that their league was new and unconnected to what they saw as the corruption in established baseball. Or maybe they once reacted poorly to a loss, and were called "crybabies," and "Infants" came from that.

* As with their NL counterparts, the PL's version of the New York Giants were supposed to play the PL's Steel City team, the Pittsburgh Burghers. I know: Not much imagination in these teams' names, the "Infants" aside. As with their NL counterparts, they were rained out. This game was rescheduled as part of a doubleheader the next day. The PL Giants swept, 10-2 and 12-9.