Editors’ Note, April 20, 2015

After this column was published, questions were raised about the portrait that Ratha Chaupoly described as the most treasured item in his home kitchen. Mr. Chaupoly told the reporter that the painting depicted his mother. He said that he had brought a photograph of her to an artist, whose name he never learned, and that the artist had based the painting on the photo. But after publication of the column, several readers wrote to The Times to say that the portrait’s subject was not Mr. Chaupoly’s mother, but a friend of the artist’s who had no connection to Mr. Chaupoly. When further questioned, Mr. Chaupoly acknowledged that the portrait was not of his mother, and that he had bought it, already finished, from the artist, Brian Batt. Mr. Chaupoly said that the painting had reminded him of his mother, and that he decided to tell people that she was its subject.

Ratha Chaupoly’s mother gazes back at you, eyes dark and steady, from the painting that hangs in her son’s vigilantly neat kitchen. It is based on a photograph that was taken in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in the 1970s.

She was in her 20s then, caring for three small boys while her husband, a high-ranking army officer, was imprisoned in Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge were closing in on the city.