A painting thought to be anonymous, but revealed to have been by Van Gogh has sold for $500,000. A Japanese auction company was “planning to auction off the small portrait of a peasant woman for between 10,000 and 20,000 yen ($83 to $167) after struggling to establish the identity of the artist. But a last-minute fax from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam confirmed that the picture was an early work by the Dutch impressionist master.”