Two Brothers Posed for a Portrait. One Lived to See It in the Met. Alice Neel painted two neighborhood boys in her studio in the 1960s. Fifty years later, the mystery of what happened to the picture has been solved. Jeff Neal at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the portrait that Alice Neel painted of him, at left, and his brother.Credit...Amr Alfiky/The New York Times April 2, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET When Jeff Neal was 8 or 9 years old, an older friend would take him and his brother Toby on trips around the city. They’d go to the Empire State Building or the parks, and one day they went to a large apartment on the Upper West Side that was filled with paintings.