Rembrandt’s most famous pair of portraits has returned to France

This week, the Louvre officially announced that from February 21, 2024, Rembrandt’s masterpieces – “Portrait of Martin Solmans” and “Portrait of Opien Coppit” – will be on display at the museum. The period of their stay in France will last five years. In 2029, for the next five-year period, this pair of portraits will move to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The intergovernmental agreement, unique in the history of collecting, talks about Kira Dolinina.

The presentation to the public of paired portraits of Amsterdam nouveau riche newlyweds, painted by the 28-year-old Leiden genius Rembrandt van Rijn shortly after his triumphant arrival in Amsterdam in 1634, would in any case be excellent news. Moreover, the history of these paintings is not replete with public displays. For two and a half centuries they were in the possession of the heirs of the depicted family, in 1877 one of them, Willem van Loon, sold his collection: the works presented for sale were put on display in the large hall of the van Loon mansion in Amsterdam. There they were seen and described by the French art connoisseur Eugene Fromentin, who noted the highest quality of painting, comparable, for example, to the painting “The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Tulp” (1832) painted by Rembrandt in the same period. After the exhibition, 68 Flemish and Dutch paintings from the van Loon collection were sold to the Parisian banker Gustave Samuel de Rothschild for more than a million francs. Since then, the portraits of Solmans and Coppitt have been loaned to an exhibition only once, at the Rijksmuseum in 1956, for the artist’s 350th birthday.

Despite their non-public nature, both portraits were well known to specialists and were included in all respected catalogs of Rembrandt’s paintings. These are the only full-length paired portraits of Rembrandt that have come down to us – a type of ceremonial portrait that emphasizes the high social status of the clients. Moreover, the son of a Protestant refugee from Antwerp, who in June 1633 married a girl from one of the richest families of the Republic of the United Provinces, appears here, as often happened and happens with nouveau riche, with a claim to aristocracy, because the tradition of full-length portraits goes precisely from royal and court images. An important feature of these two paintings is the unobtrusive but easily readable dialogue of the couple: you can imagine them separately, but when exhibited together, you can see that the young husband is holding out his glove to his wife, as if descending the stairs, as a sign of fidelity. The dark curtain behind the subjects’ backs and a similar light that falls sharply on Solmans’s right shoulder and more softly on Coppitt’s large lace collar are read in a single way.

In 2014, it became known that the Rothschild family was ready to part with paired portraits by Rembrandt. This became an international sensation. We immediately remembered that back in 1877, during the sale of the van Loon collection, the government of the Netherlands tried to buy these paintings, but the requested amount was not found. The departure of Rembrandt’s masterpieces (the next ones, it must be admitted) to France was perceived very painfully at that time. And now is the opportunity to rewrite history. The French were the first to respond to the announcement of the sale – adding this couple to the Louvre, already one of the two most significant collections of Rembrandt paintings in the world (after the Rijksmuseum), would be a beautiful gesture. However, the French Republic did not have money for both paintings. The interest of the Netherlands was obvious – they dreamed of returning the portraits “home”. The asking price is €160 million.

The solution to the problem was unprecedented in the history of collecting: in February 2016, an agreement was concluded between France and the Netherlands under which two museums, the Louvre and the Rijksmuseum, would each buy one painting (the Louvre – a female portrait, the Rijksmuseum – a male portrait), but would own them jointly , they will be exhibited alternately in Paris and Amsterdam and will never be exhibited separately. In the spring of 2016, the masterpieces were shown in France, in the summer – in the Netherlands, then they went for restoration. Since 2019, the films have been in Amsterdam for five years, and now they are going to conquer Paris. The five-year terms are expected to be followed by longer periods of eight years. The couple’s life in two houses also limits the possibilities for transferring this pair of paintings to any temporary exhibitions to a third party. The inviolability of this marriage is no longer threatened.