Two museums have become twins for a season. The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid and the Mauritshuis in The Hague are simultaneously lending each other 25 highlights from their permanent collections, in a swap that turns both institutions into mirror images from October 2026 to January 2027.

In Madrid, the exhibition 'Mauritshuis ♥ Thyssen-Bornemisza: Masterpieces from The Hague' opened on 9 October in the museum's new classical galleries, running until 10 January 2027. Its centrepiece is the painting many visitors will have come for: Johannes Vermeer's 'View of Delft' (c. 1660–1661), lent from The Hague, where it has hung since the Mauritshuis acquired it in 1822. The 25 Dutch Golden Age works span 1615 to 1705 and include paintings by Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Jacob van Ruisdael and Jan Steen, shown across three rooms devoted to still life and genre, landscapes, and the show's Vermeer finale.

In The Hague, the mirror exhibition 'Thyssen-Bornemisza ♥ Mauritshuis: Masters from Madrid' opened on 15 October and runs until 17 January 2027, with works by Jan van Eyck, Albrecht Dürer, El Greco, Bronzino, Antonello da Messina and Piero della Francesca exploring love in its many forms. To mark the occasion the Mauritshuis released a podcast episode asking whether Vermeer's Delft might owe something to Michael Sweerts' 'Boy with a Turban'.

The exchange has a family logic. The Thyssen-Bornemisza family's ties to the Netherlands go back to Heinrich's settlement in The Hague after the 1919 Hungarian Revolution; his son Hans Heinrich was born there, and Rotterdam hosted the collection's first international tour in 1959. A century later, the collections have come full circle.