As for the Biblical heroine, Esther was relatively low-maintenance and obedient. She didn't raise her arms or kill her enemies. For most of her life, she lived quietly among the sandy flats and cypress trees of ancient Persia (now mostly Iranian) and pretended to be a Christian. Orphan, she was raised by her older cousin Mordecai.
Esther looked like she had married King Ahaserus, as the story goes. King Ahaserus ruled the empire that spread from India to Ethiopia between 486 and 465 BC. But then everything changed when Haman, the king's advisor, came up with a plot to eradicate Persian Jews. Esther took action, believing it existed “this way” exactly. Rising her life, she confesses to the king that she is not a Christian, and she persuades him to save the people.
They may not instinctively pair Queen Ester and Rembrandt van Lysin, the Dutch master who invented realism in the 17th century. But the deliciously well-reached show at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, Esther's Book of Esther's Age explores lesser known chapters in art history when artists from the Golden Age of the Dutch created a cult of Esther's exemplary stories. Celebrating Esther, it has now coincided with Purim, a Jewish holiday that begins at sunset on Thursday, but the show could appeal to those who care about painting. Rembrandt is represented by three paintings and a half dozen etchings, and the show also includes memorable works by students Aert De Gelder and two Jans (Steen and Lievens). In Esther's story, the Dutch people claim to be a powerful light-like symbol of their own light-like symbols when they struggled to independence from the Spanish monarchy.
Rembrandt was not Jewish, but has long been considered a Jewish friend. Scholars consider it important that his wife, Saskia, lived in the vicinity of Vruanburg in Amsterdam. Its inhabitants were primarily Portuguese and Spanish Jews, and had moved to the Netherlands to escape the violence that had been unleashed by the Inquisition. Rembrandt found both a friend and a model among his neighbors.
The show opens with a gorgeous note. Rembrandt's “Hebrew Bible Jewish heroine” is segregated in a small, modest sense of isolation of its own, and if you've ever asked to be alone with Rembrandt (or the Queen), then here's your chance. It is a shining painting, and takes place when the artist is 27 years old and is already well ahead of the pack. He paints Esther as a Dutch matron in a crimson velvet dress, her face and hands glow in the fuzzy shadows that envelop her. Her older maid servant stands behind her and combs her inger-colored hair. Scholars wonder how to interpret her prominent stomach. Is she pregnant or is she just a bit heavy?
The image may seem surprising. Because if you went to school on Sunday, you were told that King Ahasuel first turned to Esther when he chose her from the beauty contest. However, Rembrandt changed the former Miss Persia into a fabric presence. You think it was part of his quest to make the painting feel more realistic. He wanted to free art from the giraffe's neck and slender limbs, glittering elegance and artefacts.
Who can deny that his Esther is arrested? As she sits in her room with a pensive look, she makes her think that it feels like a dramatic activity in itself. It's as if you're here, divided into sealed containers of biblical stories, breathing in air and atmosphere. The shadow carpet on the floor seems thicker as we see it.
I hope there were more Rembrandt on the show. His two most famous paintings related to Esther, “Ahasserus and Haman at the East Feast” (1660) and “Haman Preparing to Honor Mordecai” (1665), have refused to lend it to the country's exhibitions in recent years. (The two paintings are reproduced on the current show wall labels, urging them to think “Thank you, Putin.”)
Luckily, the show includes a rarely rented masterpiece from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Rembrandt's “Self-Portrait, 23” (1629) has nothing to do with Queen Esther, but it is not a knit pick. This is one of the most magnetic paintings ever, meeting young Rembrandt, a beautiful boy wearing a long curly hair and an olive green hat, stepping out of the deep shadows with his lips a little apart.
What makes the painting more convincing? Rembrandt stripped the mess of everyday life to emphasize the basic existential loneliness of people. However, other artists on the show, even his students, went the opposite way, filling the scene with household items and domestic trimming. Drawing Esther's books, they indulge in a newly thriving society that descends repeatedly at East banquet scenes and banquets, perhaps eating and drinking, and scenes of material bounty.
Jan Steen, the master of the messy Dutch house, painted three versions of Esther's East Feast. They reunite at the current show for the first time in decades, positioning Estelle in a context that can feel more like a biblical moment than an episode of “I Love Lucy.” In “The Wrath of Ahasuerus around 1670” (c. 1670), the king – angry, eyes bulging out of his chair – balls Haman out of his chair and sends the plate flying. Dinner – A peacock pie, decorated with bird feathers and decorated with ornate silver platters, is depicted in the air as they slide towards the floor. It is the most Dutch scene ever, with a shimmering piece of porcelain on a tile floor and a mandatory long-eared spaniel taking off his head in the foreground.
Hosted by Abigail Rapoport, curator of the Jewish Museum and Michele L. Frederick, curator of the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, the show will remain in New York until August 10th before moving to Raleigh, and later remained in condensed form at the Gardner Museum in Boston. It contains 124 objects including anonymous artisanal household items, woven chair cushions and carved oak cabinets that associate Esther's life scenes in ceramic tiles. There are also ritual objects such as the silver Prim Cup and the historic Ester Scroll.
But do artists today think about Esther? This show only includes a single contemporary piece. Fred Wilson's “Queen Ester/Harriet Tubman” (1992) is a monotype of ink in small ink that combines two women whom they have apparently never met. Photos of Tubman, an abolitionist American enslaved on the Underground Railroad, are layered on Esther's old sculptures to create a sleazy double portrait claiming the bond between a black woman and a Jewish woman without a lack of courage.
Hanging in the middle of a room of 17th-century Dutch works, Queen Esther/Harriet Tubman hopes the museum has made more effort, perhaps in catalogue essays, to define its connection to contemporary culture.
I set an example in October. Speaking in Sunday's sermon at Georgia's new birth missionary Baptist Church, pastor Kamala Harris, made the homepage news when he compared the president's Democratic candidate to the Persian Queen, aloud from the Book of Esther. “You were born to lead the country,” the pastor said, adding, “You were born for such a time.”
The phrase “time like this” may seem to refer to a particular situation. But we leave the show, even in the ancient sands of the Persian Empire, or even the bustle of Amsterdam in Rembrandt, or even the current upheaval, even in the current upheaval, when we prove that ordinary people can do extraordinary things.
Esther's book from Rembrandt era
Until August 10th at the Jewish Museum at 1109 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. (212)-423-3200; thejewishmuseum.org.
