A photograph that was long thought to be of the 13-year-old Vincent van Gogh has now been proven to be a portrait of his brother Theo van Gogh, aged 15, the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam said on Thursday.

Experts have reached this new conclusion on the basis of new, in-depth research conducted by the Van Gogh Museum and other experts as well as forensic examination, the museum said.

‘I was surprised to hear that this photograph is very likely to be of my great-grandfather Theo, and therefore not of Vincent, but I am pleased that the mystery has been solved,’ said Theo’s great grandson Willem van Gogh.

‘It is essential that Vincent van Gogh’s legacy is correctly passed on and preserved, and this research makes a significant contribution to such efforts’.

There were previously only thought to be two known portrait photographs of Vincent: two prints of – as was believed – a 13-year old boy and one print of a 19-year-old young man. The photograph of the 13-year-old ‘Vincent’ was first publicly presented at a 1957 exhibition and since then has been included in countless biographies.

‘The question of whether it could be someone else never came up,’ said museum researcher Teio Meedendorp. ‘ There was never any immediate cause for doubt, precisely also because the boy in this photograph bears similarities to the portrait of the 19-year-old Vincent.’

Exhibition

The certainty about the identity of the boy was called into question in 2014 on a Dutch television programme and independently by Yves Vasseur who had organised an exhibition about Van Gogh for the Mons 2015 European Capital of Culture event.

‘I discovered by chance that the photographer who took the portrait in question, Balduin Schwarz, only moved into his photographic studio in Brussels in 1870,’ Vasseur said.

‘I realised that Vincent would have been much older than 13 at the time, and wondered whether it was even possible for it to be him in the photograph,’ he said.

‘After conducting plenty of my own research, I decided to share my doubts about the identification with the Van Gogh Museum, and we subsequently decided to collaborate to solve this ‘identity crisis’ once and for all’.