Want to be Alone With a Rembrandt and a Queen? Here’s Your Chance.

A new exhibition at the Jewish Museum explores the cult of Queen Esther, whose story won the hearts of Dutch Masters and some artists today.

As far as biblical heroines go, Esther was relatively low-maintenance and docile. She did not take up arms or slay any enemies. For much of her life, she lived quietly amid the sandy flats and cypress trees of ancient Persia (now mainly Iran), pretending to be gentile. An orphan, she was raised by her older cousin Mordecai, who coached her to conceal her faith in an age of religious persecution.

Esther, the story goes, was such a looker she wound up marrying King Ahasuerus, who ruled an empire that stretched from India to Ethiopia, between 486-465 B.C. He had no idea that she was Jewish. But then everything changed when Haman, the king’s adviser, conceived a plot to eradicate the Jews of Persia. Esther was stirred to action, believing she existed precisely “for such a time as this.” Risking her life, she confessed to the king that she was not a gentile after all, and she persuaded him to save her people.

You might not instinctively pair Queen Esther with Rembrandt van Rijn, the Dutch master who invented realism in the 17th century. Yet “The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt,” a delectably wonky show at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, explores a little-known chapter in art history when artists of the Dutch Golden Age made a cult of Esther’s exemplary story. Though timed to coincide with Purim, the Jewish holiday that celebrates Esther and begins at sundown on Thursday, the show is likely to appeal to anyone who cares about painting. Rembrandt is represented by three paintings and a half dozen etchings, and the show also includes memorable works by his pupil Aert de Gelder and the two Jans (Steen and Lievens). It argues that the Dutch people found in the story of Esther a potent symbol of their own plight at a time when they were struggling for independence from the Spanish monarchy.

Rembrandt was not Jewish, but has long been considered a friend of the Jews. Scholars consider it significant that and his wife, Saskia, lived on the periphery of Amsterdam’s Vlooienburg, then the epicenter of immigrant life. Its residents were mostly Portuguese and Spanish Jews who had moved to Holland to escape the violence unleashed by the Inquisition. Rembrandt found both friends and models among his neighbors.

The show opens on a sumptuous note. Rembrandt’s “Jewish Heroine From the Hebrew Bible,” is sequestered in a small antechamber of its own, and if you ever sought to be alone with a Rembrandt (or a queen), here is your chance. It’s a radiant painting, done when the artist was 27 and already way ahead of the pack. He depicts Esther as a Dutch matron, in a crimson velvet dress, her face and hands glowing against the fuzzy shadows that enfold her. Her elderly maidservant stands behind her, combing her ginger-colored hair. Scholars have wondered how to interpret her protruding stomach. Is she pregnant, or is she merely a little heavy?