to comb or to paint

Question

ils peignent leurs cheveux, ils peignent un tableau. Are these different verbs with a double meaing?  To comb and to paint.

Accepted Answer

These are different verbs - peindre = to paint, and peigner = to comb. It just happens, by coincidence, that they are identical in the ils form of the present tense, and in some other conjugations.
There are a surprisingly (to me) large number of verbs where this happens. Sometimes a verb in one tense is the same as another verb in a different tense. I gave a link to this list before, which includes peindre and peigner:
https://a3nm.net/blog/french_ambiguous_verbal_forms_2.html