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A couple painted by the leading renaissance artist Bartholomäus Bruyn the Elder before their marriage in 1539 have finally been reunited after an art historian turned detective, spending two decades piecing together clues from across Europe to bring the two-panel portrait together again.
Jakob and Elisabeth Omphalius, scions of high-society in 16th-century Cologne, had stared at each other for over 350 years from their respective wooden panels before being inexplicably separated during a sale at a London auction house in 1896.
With their canvases unhinged, the portraits making up the diptych had gone their own way, and the identities of the man and woman already lost to memory by the time of the auction, appeared fated to be forgotten for ever.
The mysterious young woman, with braids in her hair and a bittersweet sprig in her hands – two possible artistic signposts of an impending marriage – had ended up in the Rijksmuseum collection in Amsterdam in 1912 before being given on loan to the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague in 1951.
The presence at the back of the painting of the coat of arms of Peter Bellinghausen, a professor of civil law in Cologne, suggested the woman was likely to be one of four daughters posing ahead of a marriage but no one knew where her intended might be found or indeed who he could be.
It was only 20 years ago that the first vital clues emerged when Ariane van Suchtelen, curator at the Mauritshuis – a museum dedicated to the art of the Dutch Golden Age – discovered a catalogue of the London auction in the archives of the RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History.
There she found the sale records of a diptych misattributed as being by the Dutch painter Jan Gossaert but also sketches of the family arms of the featured couple which drew a link to the mysterious woman in the Mauritshuis.
There was also an old photograph of the man’s portrait. Armed with that and the man’s family crest, Van Suchtelen went to the Cologne City Museum, where she found that the man’s coat of arms had belonged to Jakob Omphalius, a respected lawyer who become chancellor of his city in 1545.
The city’s well-preserved civil records further revealed that Jakob had been married to Elisabeth Bellinghausen on 8 February 1539.
But then the trail went cold. “At the auction they were separated, maybe to make more money – in the art trade you never know,” said Van Suchtelen. “The man was sold to an English dealer, Ralph Brocklebank, and the other portrait ended up in the collection of Cornelis Hoogendijk, who left it to Rijksmseum in 1912. So we had everything apart from Omphalius’s painting. I had to keep my eye open.”
Records showed that the man’s painting had last been auctioned in 1955 but nothing had been seen of the piece since. It was not until May 2019 that Jakob reappeared as a “portrait of an unknown man” at a small auction house in Paris.
The art collector Galerie De Jonckheere had bought the painting without knowing the identity of the person it featured. But when he put the painting on display in Geneva it was spotted by an art curator at a German museum as the portrait the Mauritshuis had been seeking.
With the help of the Rembrandt Association, the Dutch lottery and a private donor, Omphalius’s portrait was purchased this year for €250,000 (£225,000). “And when you see them next to each other you see how well they go together – all the details go together very nicely,” said Van Suchtelen.
Jakob is known to have studied in Utrecht, Paris and Toulouse before returning to Cologne to marry Elisabeth at the age of 39. She is believed to have been aged about 21 at the time of the portrait by Bruyn the Elder, a German master whose works appear in the National Gallery in London and the Louvre in Paris.
The couple had 13 children, six of whom survived childhood. After Jakob’s death in 1567, at the age of 67, Elisabeth remarried and had a 14th child.
“We had an obligation to reunite them,” Van Suchtelen said of her search. “For me it makes sense. I’m glad we had the patience for its reappearance.”
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