Art detectives crack forgery riddle

JERUSALEM - The portrait of a glum, bespectacled man was about to go on auction in Amsterdam when someone at Sotheby's noticed a problem: Israel's national museum owned precisely the same painting.

One of them had to be a fake.

For curators at the Israel Museum, cracking the riddle of the Jozef Israels self-portrait and its mysterious twin meant tracking down a tale about a forgotten Turkish pasha and an eccentric Jerusalem artist, and using infrared cameras to peer underneath the painting's muted oils.