Rembrandt's 1634 Wedding Portraits of Marten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit

Petria Noble is coming to the Denver Art Museum on Tuesday, October 13, for a talk on two of Rembrandt van Rijn's most famous works: the 1634 wedding portraits of Marten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit. The session runs from 6 PM to 7 PM in the Sharp Auditorium, located on the lower level of the Hamilton Building.

If you're not familiar with the backstory, these two portraits were acquired in 2016 by the Netherlands' Rijksmuseum and France's Musée du Louvre. That purchase kicked off an eighteen-month collaboration between conservators, researchers, and scientists from the Rijksmuseum, the Louvre, and the C2RMF. In 2024, the paintings went through even more research, adding reflectance imaging spectroscopy in the VNIR and SWIR spectral regions, paint cross-section analysis, and close surface examination to the macro-X-ray fluorescence imaging that had been done back in 2016. Noble's talk centers on that whole process.

Noble is a specialist in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings and one of the leading experts in the technical analysis of Rembrandt. She's spent over thirty years treating and researching his work, and she previously served as Head of Paintings Conservation at both the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Mauritshuis in The Hague. The session is supported by a grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

It's a good chance to hear from someone who's spent decades working on Rembrandt's paintings and can walk you through the science that goes into conserving them. The talk is at the Denver Art Museum on Tuesday, October 13, from 6 PM to 7 PM in the Sharp Auditorium, Hamilton Building, Lower Level.