French Excellence series adds Rembrandt portrait coins

Rectangular 2025 Proof gold €50 coins featuring a pair of Rembrandt paintings are among offerings in the continuing French Excellence series by Monnaie de Paris.

Images courtesy of Monnaie de Paris

Once the palace of kings, the Louvre is the most visited museum in the world with no fewer than 8.9 million visitors in 2023. The museum’s most famous works include the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, the Crouching Scribe, the Victory of Samothrace and the Code of Hammurabi. 

In 2019, the Paris Mint’s French Excellence series featured the world’s most famous painting: Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. In 2021, a piece followed featuring the coronation of emperor Napoleon I, based on a painting by Jacques-Louis David. In 2022, the Louvre was once again the subject of the French Excellence series, this time celebrating the bicentenary of Egyptology. In 2025, Monnaie de Paris represents two inseparable portraits by Rembrandt, jointly acquired in 2016 by the Louvre Museum and the Rijksmuseum. The coin design brings them together in a single frame, in honor of their return to the galleries of the Parisian museum for the next five years.

Painted in 1634, these two life-size portraits are among the great artworks of Rembrandt, one of the masters of Dutch painting. They bear witness to the marriage of Marten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit. The two figures are in dialogue: the young man, sure of himself and his place in the social edifice, welcomes his wife, the heiress of one of the wealthy families of the economic capital of the United Provinces.

They are the only known life-size portraits painted by Rembrandt, a style then reserved for the highest European nobility. Although painted individually, the portraits are lucky to have never been separated since the 17th century. Under the agreement between France and the Netherlands, they must always be exhibited together.

Celebrating their exhibit, Monnaie de Paris is minting rectangular pieces in silver and gold. On each coin, the names of the subjects, the painter and the date of issue, 2025, separate the two paintings. On several options, a portrayal of the artworks’ original frame borders the portraits above and at the sides, with depictions of the museums in which the artworks will alternately reside in the border below, the Rijksmuseum on the left and the Louvre on the right.

On the obverse of a Brilliant Uncirculated half-kilogram silver €250 coin, the portraits are colorized and depicted in full. 

The Proof quarter-ounce gold €50 and 100-gram silver €50 coins present busts of the subjects. 

The Proof 22.2-gram silver €10 coin’s obverse presents the colorized busts. A portrayal of the artworks’ original frame again borders the portraits, but with the Rijksmuseum on the bottom and the Louvre on top.

The reverse, common to the collection, depicts the Louvre building as seen from the inner courtyard. In the foreground is the Louvre’s famous Pyramid, through which the Winged Victory of Samothrace is seen. The name of the museum is inscribed at the bottom of the pyramid, along with the hallmarks in the extremities of the pyramid’s base. RF  identifying the nation of issue, the Republic of France, and the face value appear above the roofs of the Palais du Louvre.

Monnaie de Paris will offer the coins beginning Jan. 28.

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