Art Review: Queen Esther and Rembrandt Show at the Gardner

The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt is the brilliant, edifying new exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. I know, it’s nowhere close to Purim, the upbeat Jewish holiday honoring the heroine Esther, and Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur aren’t upbeat at all, but I’m a philosemite, so I mean well. The show — 39 works of art, among them three paintings by Rembrandt (1606–1669) — takes us to Esther’s story in ancient Persia, circa 470s b.c., and to mid-17th-century Amsterdam and the Netherlands, just freed from Spanish rule and in its Golden Age. Esther was much celebrated then by Dutch Christians and Jews alike.

I almost never toss “edifying” among my superlatives and rarely “brilliant,” but the Gardner’s show is so good that it should constitute a class for all those one-trick-pony curators in the field today. The Book of Esther, in fact, passes a swath of curatorial commandments. As an art critic, I think these are nearly as vital as the ones delivered atop Mount Sinai. I’ve seen shows so bad, they’ve tested my observance of God’s Sixth.

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Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

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The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt is the brilliant, edifying new exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. I know, it’s nowhere close to Purim, the upbeat Jewish holiday honoring the heroine Esther, and Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur aren’t upbeat at all, but I’m a philosemite, so I mean well. The show — 39 works of art, among them three paintings by Rembrandt (1606–1669) — takes us to Esther’s story in ancient Persia, circa 470s b.c., and to mid-17th-century Amsterdam and the Netherlands, just freed from Spanish rule and in its Golden Age. Esther was much celebrated then by Dutch Christians and Jews alike.

I almost never toss “edifying” among my superlatives and rarely “brilliant,” but the Gardner’s show is so good that it should constitute a class for all those one-trick-pony curators in the field today. The Book of Esther, in fact, passes a swath of curatorial commandments. As an art critic, I think these are nearly as vital as the ones delivered atop Mount Sinai. I’ve seen shows so bad, they’ve tested my observance of God’s Sixth.