The Art Newspaper asks "Is Van Gogh hiding at the back of this Toulouse-Lautrec drawing?" and shows us the drawing in question with its very Vincent-looking man not so much hiding as shyly loitering in it.

"Although we know Van Gogh so well from his 36 painted self-portraits, depictions of him by other artists are rare," The Art Newspaper notes.

"We can now add another - from no less a hand than his friend Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the lover of Montmartre nightlife. This drawing is now in the collection of the Hiroshima Museum of Art.

"Vincent is the small caricatured figure at the very back, just to the left of the pillar. He has a beard, moustache and a tuft of hair on his forehead."

The discovery that the figure in this cabaret scene is quite likely to be Vincent has been made by the Amsterdam Van Gogh Museum's senior researcher, Louis van Tilborgh. The Toulouse-Lautrec sketch depicts a scene at the cabaret Le Mirliton, located at the bottom of Montmartre in Paris. Other patrons in the drawing include Toulouse-Lautrec himself (he is wearing a nifty bowler hat) and others, probably artists and avant-garde poets, that students of the Montmartre of the day will find it exciting to try to identify.

Because of the extreme rarity of others' depictions of Vincent the drawing has, for all who love him, some of the same qualities of one of those mysterious old black-and-white family photographs in which we suddenly, with a gasp of excitement, think we may have found a fabled old great uncle.

Funnily enough Vincent was already on your columnist's mind not only because of recent discussion of him with a friend (an artist herself, she has imagined him with us in Canberra today and painted a Gungahlin landscape-skyscape in his own inimitable way) but because of news of a new commercially invented hue of blue.

One feels sure that Vincent, always preoccupied with the nitty-gritty of what artists' colours were and weren't on sale and available to him (often purchased for him by his supportive brother Theo) to use to depict the world about him, and making so many uses of the narrow range of artists' blues available to be purchased and mixed, would have been very excited by news and pictures of YInMn. His virtuoso uses of blues (The irises! The starry skies!) are hallmarks of his most wondrous works.

Let me explain.

Smithsonian Magazine reports, with a dazzling photograph of a heap of a powder of startling blueness, that "For the First Time in 200 Years, a New Blue Pigment Is Up for Sale. Researchers discovered YInMn Blue in 2009. Now, you can purchase a tiny tube of the bright blue paint for $179.40."

"The [new pigment] is rooted in a happy accident ... In 2009, Mas Subramanian, a professor of material science at Oregon State University, was conducting experiments with his students to make new materials for electronics. They mixed and heated different combinations of chemicals, and much to their surprise, one of the samples turned a brilliant, never-before-seen shade of blue. The team called the color YInMn after the chemicals that were combined to create it: yttrium, indium and manganese oxides."

"YInMn Blue, which is remarkably vibrant and durable, is the first new blue pigment to be discovered since cobalt blue in 1802."

Now the USA's Environmental Protection Agency, having previously cautiously approved YInMn for industrial uses, has at last approved its sale in tubes to artists.

"People around the world have gravitated toward blue," Smithsonian Magazine trills, "which was the first man-made pigment, for millennia. Given the difficulty of extracting blue from natural sources, artists throughout history have had to create synthetic blue pigments."

Colour-appreciative folk are very excited by the new blue (you are quite likely to go "Golly" when you go online and see it) but I realise some of this columnist's excitement is to do with it being so close to the shades of blue that one sees in radiant, clear, Australian summer skies of the kind we are blessed with in this unpolluted, sub-Alpine ACT. Australian landscape painters, when and if they can get their hands on some tubes of it (it is fabulously expensive and scarce and only available through two upmarket sellers) will be able to do Australian skies a hitherto unavailable justice.

Vincent's own eyes are famously of "china blue" (in Don McLean's lovely, reverential hymn to the dear Impressionist) but on Thursday and playing tennis with some mates at Kippax Tennis Club in Belconnen the sky above and around us was a dazzlingly, radiantly, dizzyingly YInMn blue.

Vincent was famous for his humanitarian portrayals of ordinary folk in their everyday settings - peasants, workers in fields, washerwomen beside rivers, café-goers at their tables. And somehow as I played on Thursday, away in the near distance, I seemed to see, shyly loitering in the shade of the Kippax Tennis Club clubhouse while busily sketching us players and taking rapt notice of the light and the sky around us, a small figure with a beard, moustache and a tuft of hair on his forehead.