The French and Dutch governments and two of Europe’s leading museums, the Louvre in Paris and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, have come together to buy two 17th-century Rembrandt wedding portraits, promising that they will always be exhibited together as a pair.
It's understood that the purchase, which will cost each country €80 million, was regarded as so important and unusual that it had to be signed off on the fringes of the UN general assembly in New York last week by France's president Francois Hollande and Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte.
Competition for Old Masters is always intense in the art world, but what finally convinced the two governments to co-operate in making the €160 million purchase from the Rothschild family was the prospect that the paintings could be snapped up by buyers from China or the Gulf.
The portraits will go on display first in Amsterdam, in the Rijksmuseum’s Gallery of Honour, which already features Rembrandt’s 1642 masterpiece, De Nachtwacht, or The Night Watch, regarded as arguably the finest example of Dutch Golden Age painting.
"A couple of months ago it still seemed unthinkable", said Rijksmuseum director Wim Pijbes, "but now the two magnificent portraits will be together in two world-famous museums."
‘Like a pair of shoes’
Describing the two paintings as “like a pair of shoes, never to be separated”, Mr Pijbes said it was entirely new in the museum world, and “a good solution”, for two countries to work together to secure artworks from a private collection.
The unique life-size portraits are of Maerten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit, an affluent Amsterdam couple who were painted by Rembrandt to mark their wedding in 1634 when all three of them were in their 20s and the artist was at the start of his career.
The paintings were bought by the Rothschilds from the Van Loon family in 1877 for 1.5 million Dutch guilders and taken to Paris, despite attempts by the Dutch government to stop them leaving the country.
They are currently in the collection of 74-year-old French banker Baron Eric de Rothschild, who also runs the family wine estate, Chateau Lafite Rothschild, producer of some of the world's most expensive red wines, near Bordeaux in France.
Always intended to be viewed "as a unit", the portraits did go on exhibition briefly in the Netherlands in 1956, but that is believed to have been the only time they were seen publicly in the past 138 years.
Despite some public disquiet, the Netherlands had originally expressed an interest in buying both paintings for €160 million, with one half being contributed by the state and the other by the Rijksmuseum, which reopened in April 2013 after a refurbishment that itself cost €375 million.
However, it emerged over the past week that French culture minister Fleur Pellerin and the Louvre had been trying since 2013 to purchase one of the pictures, prompting fears that if both countries continued to compete, both might ultimately lose out.
