Riddle! help please?

Question

the riddle is "A man is looking at a portrait and saying brothers or sisters have i none the man in the portrait father is son of my father".

i don't have any clue what the answer is.

yeah molly is right the riddle is "brothers and sister have i none but this man's father is my father's son.

Answer 1

he is speaking about himself. the version i heard was
"brothers and sister have i none but this man's father is my father's son.

Answer 2

Solution
Who is this man?

We start with an old nut. A man was looking at a portrait. Someone asked him, "Whose picture are you looking at?" He replied: "Brothers and sisters have I none, but this man's father is my father's son."

Whose picture was the man looking at?


(In the text below, some words are omitted. These have been underlined. Click just above the line. See what happens.)

There are several persons mentioned in the problem whose relationship is essential to its solution. Let call the fellow in the portrait A and the one looking at A's portrait B. The B's sentence, the gist of the problem, can be translated as

(1) 's father is 's father's

There is no doubt that, since B has no siblings, he is the only child of his father. In other words, B's father's son is . (1) then admits of simplification:

(2) 's father is ,

which is another way of saying that A is B's .

This was simple, but what if B said instead, "This man's son is my father's son." How would the two be related? Let's translate:

's son is 's father's son,

which, as we already know, reduces to

's son is .

This exactly means that A is B's . And what would we learn from a slightly different sentence, "This man's son is my son's father"? This one is still translated as

's son is ,

because "my son's father" is . So this problem has exactly same solution as the previous one. And coming full circle, what do we get from "This man's father is my son's father"? It is rather obvious that "this man" and "my son" have the same father, so that A is B's son as in the original problem.

References
R. Smullyan, What Is The Name Of This Book?, Simon & Schuster, 1978

Answer 3

The portrait is of the man himself. He is his own father's son. And ONLY son, since he has no brothers or sisters..

Answer 4

Should be the portrait of his son.
the man father = son of my father
son of the father means himself
the man father means himself
so the portrait is his son

Answer 5

It's him...the guy who's looking at the portrait

Answer 6

A picture of his father?

Answer 7

hmmm, my guess is...(this is not in the brakets.. plz rewrite...it sounds icky when reading)

guess is...he is looking in a mirror.

Answer 8

its him