The archives occupy an old town house next door to the Van Gogh Museum. We had been warned to expect a chilly reception. Van Gogh is a national hero. Who were we? For starters, Pulitzer Prize or no, we spoke not a word of Dutch. Nevertheless, the two archivists, Fieke Pabst and Monique Hageman, welcomed us warmly. Before long, they were bringing us stacks of folders, offered with a smile and a few encouraging words, such as “We thought you might find these interesting, too.” We spent weeks copying file after file, many of which contained documents only in Dutch, which we would later have to have translated.

It took about five years of such efforts before the museum conferred on us the rare privilege of a visit to “the Vault.” Somewhere in the bowels of the Van Gogh Museum (the location has since changed) there was a large, windowless room with concrete walls and cruel warehouse lighting. Against the walls were stacks of the high-tech aluminum “crates” used to transport the museum’s treasures to exhibitions around the world.

The senior curator for drawings, Sjraar van Heugten, unlocked the Vault door and took us inside. He slid a Solander box onto a tabletop and opened it to reveal a stack of drawings that Van Gogh had made early in his career. The letters were there, too. The actual letters. We held them in our (gloved) hands. On the top of a filing cabinet stood a copper bowl featured in one of his most famous still lifes. Over there, the plaster nude figure that appeared in dozens of drawings and paintings. Suddenly, we realized we were surrounded not just by the products of his imagination but by the objects of his daily life, and we felt the almost religious spell attached to him. But, meanwhile, our digging in the archives was beginning to undermine one of the pillars of that faith: the story of how the artist died.

Van Gogh himself wrote not a word about his final days. The film got it wrong: he left no suicide note—odd for a man who churned out letters so profligately. A piece of writing allegedly found in his clothes after he died turned out to be an early draft of his final letter to his brother Theo, which he posted the day of the shooting, July 27, 1890. That letter was upbeat—even ebullient—about the future. He had placed a large order for more paints only a few days before a bullet put a hole in his abdomen. Because the missile missed his vital organs, it took 29 agonizing hours to kill him.

None of the earliest accounts of the shooting—those written in the days immediately after the event—mentioned suicide. They said only that Van Gogh had “wounded himself.” Strangely, the townspeople of Auvers, the picturesque community near Paris where he stayed in the last months of his life, maintained a studied silence about the incident. At first, no one admitted having seen Van Gogh on his last, fateful outing, despite the summer crowding in the streets. No one knew where he would have gotten a gun; no one admitted to finding the gun afterward, or any of the other items he had taken with him (canvas, easel, paints, etc.). His deathbed doctors, an obstetrician and a homeopathist, could make no sense of his wounds.

And, anyway, what kind of a person, no matter how unbalanced, tries to kill himself with a shot to the midsection? And then, rather than finish himself off with a second shot, staggers a mile back to his room in agonizing pain from a bullet in his belly?