Who Killed Vincent van Gogh?
“For a century, no one has asked that question. Maybe it’s time we did.”
Time Magazine
October 31, 2011
History tells us that Vincent van Gogh, the most popular artist of all time, died by his own hand in the French village of Auvers-sur-Oise on July 29, 1890.
But in the twenty-first century, this iconic suicide has been increasingly disputed. To the point that a 2012 Vanity Fair cover story on the phenomenon would dub Van Gogh’s death as “Art’s Greatest Mystery.”
You have reached vangoghdeath.com, which for the past decade has been the vehicle for an organized, far-ranging internet inquiry into this mystery.
In the ten years of the site’s existence, more than a hundred armchair sleuths from around the world, both amateurs and Van Gogh professionals, have gathered here to pose theories, debate evidence and offer original research in what amounted to a think-tank of alternate Van Gogh history.
Dozens of compelling murder scenarios would emerge from this effort, each with its passionate adherents. But the site’s focus has gradually narrowed on one mindboggling theory that might be proven by one dramatic piece of evidence: a long-lost, last Van Gogh letter that numerous witnesses claim came to light seventy years ago in midcentury Paris only to just as mysteriously vanish again in the same period.
Our search for this letter, and with it this inquiry, has now come to its end. Its forum is closed, its links are disabled and the site is no longer active. But it is in the process of being reconstructed to support a book that will showcase the results, and some of the contours, of that search.
The book, perhaps surprisingly, is a novel: Exile in the Light by William Arnold, who besides being a noted journalist, film critic, bestselling novelist and one of the creators of this site, has also been the overseer of its campaign to find this elusive Van Gogh Letter.
Why a novel instead of a nonfiction book, or stop-the-presses news story? First, because its factual basis is so revolutionary to Van Gogh history, and is bound to be so controversial, that he, and we, feel it needs to be presented within a cushioning context, and in stages. Second, because it provides the rare opportunity to do a little of what the great Joesphine Tey did in her classic 1951 novel, The Daughter of Time, and that is introduce new evidence, and make a factual case for a fairly earthshaking revision of accepted history, within the structure of a fictional detective story.
Followers of the site will know that the publication of this book has been announced numerous times over the years, only to be yanked back with the necessity of a total rewrite by the advent of some game-changing new testimony or piece of evidence. With the closure of the investigative features of this site, that is not likely to happen again. The book should definitely be publishied in the summer or fall of 2026, at which point this site, retooled and ready to offer nonfiction support, will reopen.
