The story
In September 2025 a painting two metres high went on show in Nivå, a seaside village north of Copenhagen, in a museum of just three main rooms. It was Susanna and the Elders by Artemisia Gentileschi, the Italian Baroque painter, bought that summer from a New York dealer. It joined the museum's best-known picture, a family portrait by Sofonisba Anguissola, the Renaissance painter from Cremona, showing her father with her brother, her sister and a small dog. With works by four women painters active before 1700, Nivaagaard now shows more of them than the three named in the Louvre's online catalogue.
The core of the collection was assembled between 1895 and 1905 by Johannes Hage, a Danish politician who owned the Nivaagaard estate, with advice from scholars such as Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, the Dutch Rembrandt expert. In 1908 he made it an independent foundation open to the public, housed in a gallery building of 1903 in the estate grounds. Venetian Renaissance pictures by Giovanni Bellini and Lorenzo Lotto hang here with Dutch works by Jan Steen and Jacob van Ruisdael, and there are rooms of the Danish Golden Age of the early 1800s, with painters such as Christen Købke.
Rembrandt's portrait of a 39-year-old woman, painted in 1632, was long counted as the only authenticated Rembrandt in Denmark. On 29 January 1999 thieves took it from the museum together with Bellini's Portrait of a Young Man. Both pictures were recovered that August, when the thieves were arrested.
