The Mauritshuis and Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza are smitten and are simultaneously exchanging of 25 highlights from each collection

From 15 October 2026 to 17 January 2027 the Mauritshuis will present a unique exhibition in collaboration with the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. As part of a once-only exchange, 25 masterpieces from the Mauritshuis will be travelling to Spain, while the museum in The Hague will welcome 25 highlights from the internationally renowned Spanish collection. The exhibition will bring to the Netherlands a selection of highlights from the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. The show, which will celebrate the enduring relationship between the two museums, is aptly based on the theme of love. This will be the first time such a simultaneous art exchange has ever taken place between two international museums.

The exhibition, Thyssen-Bornemisza ❤️ Mauritshuis – Masterpieces from Madrid will offer visitors an extraordinary opportunity to see in the Netherlands work by artists like Jan van Eyck, Albrecht Dürer, El Greco, Antonello da Messina, Piero della Francesca and Bronzino. 

Love connects

The exhibition will centre on the theme of love. The selected works from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries show love in various forms: the devotion between the Virgin Mary and Christ, the closeness of married couples, the complex relationship between Adam and Eve, and love of nature. The exhibition will also explore love of painting itself: the skill, the imagination and the quest for beauty that have inspired artists through the centuries. Religious images, scenes from mythology, portraits and a ‘tronie’ (character study) will provide a full survey of human emotions and artistic ideals in the history of European art. Bringing together all these works, the exhibition will also show how artists from different regions of continental Europe influenced and inspired each other, telling a story of cultural exchange and shared artistic traditions.

Religious images, scenes from mythology, portraits and a ‘tronie’ (character study) will provide a full survey of human emotions and artistic ideals in the history of European art. Bringing together all these works, the exhibition will also show how artists from different regions of continental Europe influenced and inspired each other, telling a story of cultural exchange and shared artistic traditions.

Dynamic duo

The exhibition will feature one very special ‘loving couple’: Boy in a Turban (c. 1658-1661) by Michael Sweerts from Madrid and our own Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665) by Vermeer. These two youngsters are a dynamic duo, not only in terms of their composition and use of colour, but also of their age. The Girl will be in her usual spot (room 15), but she will be linked via a livestream to the exhibition hall with Sweerts’ boy, prompting an unexpected visual dialogue.

All the details

During the exhibition, one of the 25 paintings on loan will be shown with the permanent collection at the Mauritshuis: Sebastiano del Piombo’s Portrait of Ferry Carondolet with his Secretaries (c. 1510-12). This portrait from Thyssen-Bornemisza is reproduced in great detail in Apelles Painting Campaspe by Willem van Haecht (c. 1630), just one of the many items in the majestic art collection that features in this painting from the Mauritshuis collection. These two works have never before been shown together.

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza

The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid is one of Spain’s leading art museums, with a remarkable collection of European painting spanning seven centuries. The foundations of the museum were laid by industrial magnate and art collector Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, in a collection that was later expanded by his son Hans Heinrich. The collection was purchased by the Spanish state in 1993, and the museum opened in Palacio de Villahermosa, an elegant 18th-century palace in the heart of Madrid.  

Hans Heinrich August Gábor Tasso Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kászon, Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza (1921-2002), was a Swiss industrialist and art collector born in the Netherlands (in Scheveningen). He was heir to a German fortune that came from steel, banking and shipbuilding. In the 1990s Baron Thyssen, a great art collector, helped with the purchase of two paintings for the Mauritshuis collection: a floral still life by Jan Davidszoon de Heem (c. 1670) and Wooded Landscape with Cottages by Meindert Hobbema (c. 1665).