Vincent van Gogh shoots himself in Auvers-sur-Oise (1890), and British mariner Charles Fryatt executed in Bruges (1916). Born on this day: Giosuè Carducci, Murad IV and Alexandre Dumas, fils. Died: John Dalton, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and Mikhail Lermontov.
31 events, 58 births and 54 deaths on this date.
The Dutch painter, known for bold colour and thick, restless brushwork, was left with a gunshot wound after years of mental illness and poverty. He died two days later, having made roughly 860 oil paintings in barely a decade.
Vincent van Gogh · CC BY-SA 4.0Vincent van GoghHear the story in ChunksA British mariner, Charles Fryatt was put to death after a German court-martial branded him a franc-tireur, a label for irregular fighters outside the laws of war. Many in Britain saw the sentence as proof of German brutality.
The fighting on the Korean Peninsula stopped with an armistice agreed at P'anmunjŏm, a village on the border. It did not bring a formal peace treaty, so the two Koreas remain technically at war to this day.
Francis Xavier, one of the first companions of Ignatius of Loyola, landed in Japan and set about preaching Christianity there. He is remembered as the Jesuit who opened the Society's mission to Japan.
Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, marching overland to the Holy Land, reached Niš, the seat of Serbian ruler Stefan Nemanja. The stop shows how the German army's route cut through Balkan lands on the way to the Third Crusade.
Münzstätte Frankfurt a.M. · CC BY-SA 4.0
Tokyo police found the remains of Sogen Kato, a man who had likely been dead for around three decades. The discovery prompted wide inquiries into how isolated elderly people in Japan were going unnoticed.
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Carducci was a poet, critic and teacher whose verse came to stand for the newly unified nation. In 1906 he won Italy's first Nobel literature prize, recognised for his lyrical force and scholarship.
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain
Murad IV took the Ottoman throne as a child and later ruled with fierce, often cruel methods, restoring the state's authority. He was also a poet, and his war with Safavid Persia split the Caucasus between the two empires for roughly two centuries.
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain
French novelist and playwright best remembered for La Dame aux Camélias, the 1848 novel that became Verdi's opera La traviata. He was the son of Alexandre Dumas père, author of The Three Musketeers.
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain
John Dalton died in Manchester, aged 77. He is remembered for proposing that each element is made of identical atoms, and for the first scientific description of colour blindness, which he studied in himself.
CC BY 4.0
The last Shah of Iran, he ruled from 1941 until the Islamic Revolution forced him from power in 1979. He died in exile in Egypt, a year after leaving Iran for good.
Ghazarians · Public domain
Lermontov, the Russian Romantic poet often called the poet of the Caucasus, was killed in a duel at 26. His prose, especially A Hero of Our Time, helped found the Russian psychological novel.
Petr Zabolotskiy · Public domain
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