"Van Gogh--The Life," by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith
Recently I saw an extraordinary animated film called Loving Vincent. It was animated in the style of Van Gogh's paintings, and it was constructed around the last days of Van Gogh and his purported suicide--I say purported" as the film casts doubt on whether the death was actually suicide. Well worth seeing, although you will find that its distribution in cinemas is very spotty.
The film prompted me to get the biography cited in the title of this post. It is a brick--heavy, 879 pages of solid text. It is a great achievement, I am sure, and it must have involved years of research.
I only took it out of the library to read the chapters on the final couple of months of Van Gogh's life and death, and it certainly provided a great deal of evidence that Van Gogh did not commit suicide but was shot accidentally in an encounter he had with a group of youths who were in the habit of teasing and tormenting him. One had a revolver that probably went off accidentally. Van Gogh's semi-admission that he had tried to kill himself was probably made to protect the youth whose gun had shot him.
The subject is of great interest in the biography, and there is a 12 page Appendix ---A Note on Vincent's Fatal Wounding.
So my reading was confined to the last chapters and it certainly provided a fascinating analysis of just how tormented a character Vincent was, especially in his relationship with his brother Theo, who died six months after Vincent.