One of French painter Paul Gauguin's most famous paintings, Mata Mua, will return to a Madrid museum on Monday following an agreement between the Spanish government and its owner, who took it out of the country.

The artwork had been on display for two decades at Madrid's Thyssen-Bornemisza museum but in 2020 when the institution closed because of the pandemic, the painting's owner Carmen Thyssen moved it to Andorra where she currently lives.

Her decision to take Mata Mua to the microstate sandwiched between Spain and France raised fears she would remove other works from her collection which are on display at the museum.

"It is expected that the painting will arrive today," a spokeswoman for the museum told AFP.

The artwork will go back on display to the public "a few days after" Thyssen signs a new agreement with the Spanish state for the lease of her collection, she added. The deal is expected to be signed on Wednesday.

Painted in 1892 in vivid, flat colours, Mata Mua depicts two women, one playing the flute and the other listening, set against a lush Tahitian landscape.

It is one of the stars of Thyssen's collection of several hundred paintings which are on show at the museum, including works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Claude Monet.

The Thyssen-Bornemisza museum in Madrid. Photo: Wikipedia

Her collection had initially been displayed at the Madrid museum as part of a free loan agreement signed in February 2002 that was subsequently extended.

But in August 2021 Spain's culture ministry announced it had reached an agreement with Thyssen to rent the collection from her for 15 years for 97.5 million euros ($111.5 million), with "preferential acquisition rights on all or part" of the works.

Aside from housing her collection of works, the museum displays the collection of her late husband, Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, the Swiss heir to a powerful industrial lineage who died in Spain in 2002.

The Spanish state bought his collection in 1993 from 350 million dollars, according to the museum.