At Large  October 9, 2025  Annah Otis

A Slice of Vermeer: The Rise of Fractional Art Ownership

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Intersection of Broad Street and Wall Street with New York Stock Exchange and the Federal Hall. License.

Stock exchanges have been offering the public a piece of corporate earnings since the Dutch East India Company opened one in 1602, but only recently has art become a tradable security. Half a dozen or so investment firms specializing in art shares have been steadily evangelizing the potential financial benefits of owning a stake in otherwise out-of-budget works. 

Billionaire philanthropist Thomas Kaplan is betting on this potential with a venture that will fractionalize his 220-work collection of Dutch Golden Age paintings and launch it as an initial public offering (IPO) on the stock market. The endeavor has been dubbed "Project Minerva" after a painting in the collection by Rembrant, titled Minerva in Her Study. “Rembits,” digital shareholder tokens whose name is an amalgamation of Rembrant and Bitcoin, could be available as soon as the first half of 2026, and the Kaplan family will retain controlling interest. However, since the next generation is uninterested in art, fractionalization (paradoxically) ensures that the collection remains intact and available for public consumption.

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Rembrandt van Rijn, Minerva in Her Study, 1635. License.

And, this is for good reason. Kaplan’s Leiden Collection is one of the world’s largest private holdings of 17th-century Dutch art. It includes 17 pieces by Rembrant, what is believed to be Johannes Vermeer’s last work, and paintings by other Golden Age heavy hitters like Gerrit Dou, Jan Lievens, Jan Steen, and Frans van Mieris. Items have been lent to museums ranging from the Louvre and the State Hermitage in St. Petersburg to the Long Museum in Shanghai and the H’Art Museum in Amsterdam. The imminent IPO will ideally allow the masterpieces to remain available for public viewing for years to come, rather than frittered away in a high-security warehouse or separated in a sale.

How much appetite there is for shares in the Leiden Collection remains to be seen. The value of post-1945 artworks outpaced the S&P by 32% between 1995 and 2024, but the market for high-end pre-20th-century paintings has suffered in recent years. Attempting to IPO an entire collection is also unprecedented. 

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Job Adriaenszoon Berckheyde, The Stock Exchange in Amsterdam, 1677. License.

The last art IPO to make waves was for Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer, which Artex launched for $55 million in June 2023. Shares sold for $100 a piece on a specially created art stock exchange based in Lichtenstein. Bacon’s triptych has remained on view in various museums ever since.

Whereas auction houses charge up to 20% in commission, Artex and other art investment firms, like Masterworks, take about 3% of the IPO proceeds, plus a small fee when shares change hands. This model allows sellers to maximize their returns without necessarily relinquishing full control of a piece. Likewise, it makes it much easier for investors to access the top end of the art market where sizable profits can be made.

Project Minerva will be a telling experiment for the art market as collectors shy away from big purchases and sellers hesitate to part with pieces when the economy is shaky. Investors will smaller pockets might just be the saving grace for valuable masterpieces that could otherwise be sold and remain inaccessible to the public. More than four centuries after the Amsterdam Stock Exchange opened, Dutch paintings are making their way onto the market in the same kind of shares that their original 17th-century owners may have struck rich from. Whether they will yield equally profitable returns is yet to be seen.

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