Fourth anniversary special exhibition

Louvre Abu Dhabi opened on 11 November 2017 on Saadiyat Island, the product of an intergovernmental accord signed by France and the United Arab Emirates in March 2007. Under that agreement, twelve French public cultural establishments, coordinated by Agence France-Muséums, committed to sharing expertise and lending works from their collections to the new institution. Abu Dhabi gained the right to use the Louvre name for thirty years, and the Musée du Louvre in Paris agreed to rotate loans of its own holdings to the museum. Conceived as a universal museum celebrating shared human heritage across civilisations, Louvre Abu Dhabi was the first institution of its kind in the Arab world and welcomed more than one million visitors in its first year.

To mark its fourth anniversary in November 2021, the museum unveiled 56 new acquisitions and 59 new loans, including masterworks from several French national collections. Among the incoming loans was The Astronomer (1668), lent by the Musée du Louvre in Paris together with roughly sixty other paintings from its holdings. The painting arrived at Louvre Abu Dhabi on or just before 10 November 2021 and was displayed as part of the anniversary programme, which also included works by Fragonard, Rodin, Monet, Jackson Pollock, and Vassily Kandinsky.

The loan was initially expected to run for approximately a year, but it was subsequently extended and The Astronomer remained in Abu Dhabi until the end of May 2023. That timing proved consequential: the Rijksmuseum’s landmark Vermeer retrospective (February to June 2023) brought together 28 of the 37 paintings now accepted as authentic, yet The Astronomer could not travel to Amsterdam for it. Its companion piece The Geographer (Städel Museum, Frankfurt) was present in Amsterdam, making the absence of The Astronomer particularly notable, as the two works are believed to have been conceived as pendants and have rarely been shown together.

The Astronomer entered the Louvre collections in 1982 through a dation (payment of inheritance tax in kind) arranged by Guy de Rothschild, whose family had owned it since the nineteenth century. The canvas, oil on panel measuring 51 by 45 centimetres, depicts a scholar consulting a celestial globe by Jodocus Hondius (1600) alongside an astronomy manual opened to a chapter on the stars, and is one of only two Vermeer paintings held in French public collections.