Self-Portrait or Portrait of Theo van Gogh

One of the smallest paintings in the museum, 19 by 14 centimetres of oil on cardboard, made in Paris in 1887 while Vincent and his brother Theo were sharing a flat on the rue Lepic. For most of its life it was labelled a self-portrait. In 2011 the museum's senior researcher Louis van Tilborgh argued that the sitter is Theo: the ears are rounder than Vincent's, the goatee is yellow-brown where Vincent painted his own beard reddish, the cheeks are shaved the way Theo's are in photographs. That would make it the only known painted portrait of the brother who paid for nearly everything Vincent did. In 2019 Sjraar van Heugten, once head of collections at the same museum, read the eye colour and the clothes the other way round and gave the face back to Vincent. The label now carries both names. The picture had spent years in storage and only went on show in Amsterdam in June 2011, when the question was first put.