Portrait of Vincent Willem van Gogh

The Vincent van Gogh in this portrait is four years old. He was born in January 1890, a few months before his uncle and namesake died, and his father Theo died the year after that, leaving Jo van Gogh-Bonger a widow with a small boy and hundreds of Vincent's paintings and drawings that almost nobody wanted yet. By November 1894, when this panel was painted, Jo was running a guest house for a living and pushing her brother-in-law's work into exhibitions. The painter was Isaac Israëls, an Amsterdam friend who portrayed Jo herself many times over the years. He worked small here, oil on panel, about 16 centimetres high, less than the width of a hand. The picture stayed with the sitter for his whole life. He died in 1978, and in 2008 his heirs sold the panel to the Van Gogh Museum, the institution he had set going by putting the family collection into a foundation in 1962.