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Pendant portraits of Maerten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit

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The record-breaking pair of portraits, each measuring 208 x 132 cm

The Pendant portraits of Maerten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit are a pair of wedding portraits by Rembrandt formerly owned by the Rothschild family that became jointly owned by the Louvre Museum and the Rijksmuseum in 2015 after both museums managed to contribute half of the purchase price of 160 million euros, a record for works by Rembrandt.[1]

The reason the price was so high was due to the fact that the portraits have an impeccable provenance, in addition to having been kept together since their inception. Unlike many 17th-century portrait pairs, these two have always hung side by side in various collections based in Amsterdam or Paris. They are also unusual in Rembrandt's oeuvre for their size and the fact that they show the subjects at full length. Appearing in period inventories at regular intervals since their creation in 1634, together they form part of Rembrandt's core oeuvre against which other paintings with a more questionable lineage are compared. The subjects Maerten Soolmans and his wife Oopjen Coppit are dressed as befits a pair of wealthy Amsterdam newlyweds.

Since being acquired in 1877 by Gustave Samuel de Rothschild, the paintings were lent out for an exhibition only once, in the Rijkmuseum in 1956 on the occasion of the 350th birthday of Rembrandt.[2] Before being sold they hung together in a large hall in the Van Loon collection that was described by Eugène Fromentin in 1877 with the remark that they were examples of Rembrandt at his best and were painted in the same period that Rembrandt painted his Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, traditionally marking the start of his Amsterdam career. Clearly the flamboyance of these young newlyweds did more to launch Rembrandt's career as a portrait painter for the Amsterdam upper class than his sober depiction of a class of serious students in Leiden.[3]

Later Wilhelm von Bode was impressed enough by these paintings to include both of them in his set of 595 photogravures for his comprehensive 8-volume work on Rembrandt in 1898. Fromentin and Bode knew the paintings as the portraits of Mr. & Mrs. Daey, but it was the Amsterdam historian Isabella Henriette van Eeghen who painstakingly traced the ownership of these paintings back to their original inventories and discovered the true names of the sitters.[4]

The current joint ownership is a new arrangement for both museums and it remains to be seen whether this experiment in international art purchasing will fit into exhibition plans of both institutions. Unike many expensive paintings, these two will not be restricted by location and it is expected that they will be on tour regularly. The previous record was for two Titians, his Diana and Callisto and Diana and Actaeon, that also hang side by side and are today jointly owned by the National Gallery and the National Galleries of Scotland.[5]

See also

References

  1. ^ Press release in the Guardian
  2. ^ Photo of the exhibition showing this pair of paintings in 1956
  3. ^ Commentary by Fromentin in the Digital Library for Dutch Literature
  4. ^ Horst Gerson, Rembrandt paintings, catalog numbers 164 & 165, 1968.
  5. ^ Press release in New York Times
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