Ritratto di Oopjen Coppit

Rembrandt was 28 in 1634, newly established in Amsterdam and suddenly the portraitist everyone wanted. This is one of a pair, painted for a wedding: Oopjen Coppit and her groom Marten Soolmans, whose family money came from refining sugar. Full-length, life-size portraits like these were almost unheard of for private citizens rather than royalty, and that scale was the whole point, a young couple announcing their wealth. The two paintings stayed together for centuries. In 2016 the Louvre and the Rijksmuseum bought them jointly for 160 million euros, a record for a Rembrandt, and agreed they must always hang side by side, taking turns in Paris and Amsterdam.