Photo mystery: does the cover of a book about painter Margrieta Celmiņa actually show someone else?

A newly published book titled "Margrieta Celmiņa. The Life Story of a Painter at the Crossroads of Latvian History" features on its cover a photograph of an elegant-looking woman, long believed to be a portrait of the painter herself.

That assumption has recently been challenged in public by Vita Jaunzeme, who suggested on social media that the woman in the photograph might not be Margrieta Celmiņa at all, but rather Kristīne Bakmane-Meierovica, the second wife of Latvia's first foreign minister.

The basis for the doubt is a striking physical resemblance between photographs of the two women, which has made it difficult to say with certainty which of them actually appears in the image used on the book cover.

The comment has come as a surprise both to art historians and to the Celmiņa family, who had previously regarded the identification of the woman in the photograph as settled and beyond question.

The true identity of the person in the image remains unresolved for now. The situation has been described as a kind of photographic detective story — a puzzle whose solution may require further research into historical sources and photo archives before it can be determined with confidence which of the two women is actually pictured.