A £71 Million Question: The Rembrandt Britain Has Four Months to Keep

There is a particular kind of drama in the British art world that unfolds not in a saleroom but in a government press release. On 27 August the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport announced a temporary export bar on Rembrandt’s Portrait of Catrina Hooghsaet, painted in 1657. The valuation attached to it — £71,696,324.90, plus a little under £755,000 in VAT — makes it the most expensive object ever granted national treasure status in this country. A UK buyer now has until 26 December to declare serious interest, or the picture leaves.

What an export bar actually is

The mechanism is less exotic than it sounds. An application to permanently export a culturally significant object is referred to the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest — an independent body serviced by Arts Council England, chaired by Andrew Hochhauser KC. The committee tests the object against the Waverley criteria, three questions first formulated in the 1950s: is it closely connected with our history and national life, is it of outstanding aesthetic importance, and is it of outstanding significance for the study of some branch of art, learning or history?

Meeting any one of the three is enough. The Rembrandt met all three. The committee’s recommendation goes to the minister — in this case Ruth Mackenzie, appointed to the arts brief earlier this month — who can defer a decision on the licence, creating a window in which a British institution or an “appropriate purchaser” can attempt to match the price. If nobody does, the licence is granted and the work goes.

It is worth being clear about what the bar is not. It is neither a seizure nor a discount: the owner is entitled to the full market valuation, and the state simply buys time. The first deferral runs to 26 December, after which the owner has fifteen business days to consider any offer. If an option agreement is signed, a second deferral of nine months follows — roughly how long a campaign of this scale realistically takes.

The painting, and the woman in it

Catrina Hooghsaet was fifty when she sat for Rembrandt — the age is inscribed on the picture itself, alongside her name and his signature. She was a prosperous member of Amsterdam’s Mennonite community, and by the standards of the Dutch Republic her domestic arrangements were irregular: she lived apart from her husband. The portrait belongs to a small group of large-scale, three-quarter-length works from the artist’s final phase, and at 126 by 98.5 centimetres it has a physical presence that reproductions flatten badly. A pet parrot appears at the edge of the composition; the bird was apparently significant enough to Hooghsaet to be named in her will.

Hochhauser’s assessment for the committee is unusually warm for an official document. He describes Rembrandt transforming relatively ordinary features into a striking image through sensitivity and psychological insight — which is a reasonable summary of what the late portraits do, and why they are held in the regard they are.

Why this counts as British

Sceptics of the export bar system sometimes ask why a Dutch painting of a Dutch woman constitutes a British national treasure. The answer lies in provenance. The picture has been in this country since the mid-eighteenth century, hanging at Mereworth Castle in Kent under two successive Lords Le Despencer, before passing by descent into the Penrhyn family and remaining with them for well over a century. That long English residency is itself part of the history of collecting Rembrandt in Britain — a story in which this country played a disproportionate role and which is legible in the National Gallery, the Wallace Collection and a dozen country houses.

This is also not the picture’s first brush with the export system. It was sold privately in 2015 for £35 million, faced an export block then, and the buyer ultimately withdrew the application and lent it to National Museum Wales in Cardiff for three years from 2016. It changed hands again in a private Christie’s sale last year, at roughly double the earlier figure.

The uncomfortable arithmetic

Everyone involved knows the difficulty. Seventy-two million pounds is more than most UK museums will spend on acquisitions in a generation. The National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Art Fund and the Heritage Lottery route exist precisely for these moments, but a sum of this size would require a lead philanthropic gift of a kind that has become markedly rarer, at a moment when institutions across the country are cutting opening hours and freezing posts.

Export bars succeed more often than pessimists expect, but by no means always, and the failures rarely make headlines. What the system does reliably is force a public conversation about value: not the auction figure, but the question of what a country loses when a painting that has hung here for two hundred and seventy years goes into a container.

No public viewing has been announced. The next four months will be decided in funding meetings rather than galleries. But if a British institution does succeed, the picture that emerges — a fifty-year-old Amsterdam woman, her parrot, and one of the great portraitists at the height of his powers — will have been worth the wait.