Queen Esther and Rembrandt Rule in a Superb Show at the Gardner

A heroine, a villain, innocents slated for slaughter, just deserts, and a happy ending, presented with great art and intelligence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

T he 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.

Thou shalt be meaningful to experts and art appreciators alike. Even casually observant Jews know Esther’s story, and observant Jews know it well. Not all Christians do, and what about the heathens? They wouldn’t know Esther from ESPN. The exhibition will be a revelation to both poles and those in between. Too many curators either stuff their work with la-di-da jargon or cater to the lowest common denominator. The Gardner hits a perfect balance.

For the uninitiated, Esther is a young queen, secretly Jewish and newly married to an older man, Ahasuerus, also known as Xerxes, the despot who ruled the Persian empire at its peak. On the surface, she’s an innocent who is unaccustomed to courtly intrigue, but she uses her wits and natural courage to thwart a genocide aimed at all of Persia’s Jews.

Thou shalt be various, with layered, coherent storylines rather than one theme beaten over and over as loudly as a Lambeg drum booming at a hundred decibels. Done. Thou shalt display good art. Check. Three Rembrandts but also gorgeous textiles and furniture. Thou shalt decorate well. The show is beautiful and sumptuous, and, via curators with taste, all the art find its perfect place. Thou shalt surprise. The show is in a right-size gallery ingeniously carved into three spaces to intrigue and beguile. Art-wise, there are juxtapositions we don’t expect.

And thou shalt not bore. Both the book of Esther and the exhibition star a valiant heroine, innocents whose very lives are in peril, a splendiferous setting, an evildoer, just deserts, a happy ending, a big party, Amsterdam for the tourist in us all, and, for those with politics on the brain, a brand-new republic. And even for the woke, there’s the oppressed versus the oppressor, but in Esther’s story they’re real, not fake or faddish.

The exhibition begins in a small space with two Rembrandt etchings: The Great Jewish Bride, from 1635, plus one of my favorites among his etchings, The Triumph of Mordecai. For those who don’t know much about Esther, we’re briefed. The bride in Rembrandt’s etching isn’t just any old, clearly well-fed bride but Esther, a Jewish orphan raised by her cousin Mordecai. The story unfolds in ancient Shushan, the hub of the Persian empire and home to a community of Jewish exiles. Esther has just been picked by the king in, ahem, a beauty pageant.

The chief eunuch pushed Esther on the king — there’s always the promise of drama when a eunuch is tossed in the mix. He made sure she got the “Eunuch Eye for the Straight Gal.” No one but Mordecai knows that Esther is Jewish, though court eunuchs tend to know all. Rembrandt depicts her as a person of substance not only in body but in moral and intellectual heft.

The Triumph of Mordecai is an early show of Rembrandt’s mature style. In the print, he places multiple figures with ease, using the drypoint method more extensively than he had before, not as a black-velvet grace note here and there but to convey passages of depth and drama. He’s in peak narrative form, too. Mordecai, also an exile, has saved the king’s life by exposing an assassination attempt. The king, seated with Esther in a box above the crowd, rewards him with the grand procession displayed in the print. Leading the horse is Haman, who looks good, but he’s a snake.

Then there are two Esther scrolls from the Jewish Museum — both Dutch, from the 1640s — that tell the story of Esther with illustrations and decorative embellishments. We learn that Esther’s story isn’t just any old book in the Old Testament. Esther scrolls are read aloud in synagogues during Purim. Through her strategic cunning and willingness to take risks, we learn, Esther saves Persia’s Jews from a genocide. Once delivered, they party hardy. Purim is still a teachable moment as well as a triumph to cheer. Jews cheat the bad guys once again. I think of the Jews in Tel Aviv in air-raid shelters last year as Iran — Haman’s spawn — was firing missiles willy-nilly. They sang “I Will Survive.”

In the main gallery we learn about Amsterdam in Rembrandt’s time. It was a dynamic crossroads. The Eighty Years’ War was nearing its end, in 1648, with the Peace of Münster, which freed Protestant Netherlands from Spain, foreign in every way. The Dutch were entrepreneurial, free marketeers, and more open to religious difference. They’d already planted the seeds for hustling, bustling Manhattan. Jews found a home in Amsterdam, happier and safer there than in the rest of Europe. And Esther — not Sarah or Miriam or Ruth or Deborah or even the Marys — was in vogue.

After the exhibition gives us the barebones of Esther’s story, it teases out the details, building awareness and tension, then relaxing, then adding more drama and a denouement. Aert de Gelder’s Esther, from 1655, among other works, show us the majesty of the king’s court. its splendor had never been seen before in human history. Persia’s power was at its peak, and though despotic, debauched, and heathen, the empire did ostentation well.

A newbie, and one with a secret, Esther holds her own. Like scrappy Holland, she wins the day. She embodies the triumph of good over evil. We admire her and like her. She’s a Jewish — and Dutch — Eliza Doolittle. In rereading the book of Esther, I see that the eunuchs spent a year priming her to win the king’s favor. I bet they were as demanding, fussy, and bitchy as Henry Higgins.

An intricate cabinet from the Jewish Museum, from Dutch-speaking Antwerp and made around 1620, depicts Esther’s life, with twelve scenes on painted panels. It must have been a dazzler and showpiece then and certainly is now. It also tells us the extent to which Esther’s story was both political and a luxury item. It gives the gallery three-dimensional splendor.

We learn about Haman. He’s the king’s viceroy, a peacock of a potentate. Resentful of Jews who have been insinuating themselves into the royal court, he’s driven incandescent when Mordecai, known to be a pious leader among Jews, declines to bow in Haman’s presence. Jews bow only to God. Haman persuades the king — a surfeit of hooch might have been plied — to command the extermination of all Jews. The Jews, with centuries of history behind them since the Exodus, know that he means business.

Haman is a master oppressor and, in the Dutch telling, evolves into a surrogate for Spain. He’s also among the Bible’s most intense villains. Pharaoh is hard and stubborn but a status quo kind of guy who thought he had everyone’s best interests at heart. Cain is Cain and a one-kill wonder. Jezebel is a meanie but in an insider-baseball kind of way. Herod murdered babies, wicked, yes, but evidently that’s no longer banned in Boston.

Haman is not only into genocide. He’s also the supreme flower of envy, resentment, and blame-shifting — the source of all Jew-hate through the ages and now. A frantic Mordecai seeks Esther’s intervention. She works in chess-like moves, navigating court protocols. She maneuvers her husband, who’s got to be the flakiest despot around, into reading an account of Mordecai’s discovery of the assassination plot. Evidently having forgotten about his order to exterminate the Jews, he grants Mordecai a courtly procession, with his richly adorned horse led by a fuming Haman. That’s The Triumph of Mordecai.

Among Esther’s moves is entering the king’s throne room uninvited, a breach of protocol that’s punishable by death. She’s setting the stage for Haman’s fall and the collapse of his plan. She’s got a plan. She’s got chutzpah. She’s got more power than it looks like. She knows the stakes. “And if I perish,” she says, “I perish.” She enters, looking winsome, possibly batting her lashes, and she might have swooned. The king is moved. She’s stressed, he can tell, but why? He has no idea she is about to be killed along with all the other Jews in his kingdom. Tell me what you wish, he says, and I will grant it.

Esther has a taste for drama. She promises to tell the king what she wants but not right then, not there. She holds a banquet for the king, and Haman is an honored guest. Haman is thrilled and boasts about the invitation. It is, of course, at this banquet that Esther reveals that she’s Jewish. Her wish, directed at the king? She notes that the empire’s Jews have been destined to be annihilated “Spare my people,” she says. The king asked who connived to bring the Jews to this sorry state. “This vile Haman,” she says, pointing her finger at the aghast culprit.

In The Feast of Esther, a magnificent painting from 1625, Jan Lievens depicts the moment, capturing the high drama in more ways than one. It’s a big painting, only a little less than a 6-footer, and florid with patterns and regalia. The king looks like a despot and a gouty geezer. Haman’s back is to us, and he’s squeezed and cornered by his chair, the table, and Esther. Space in the painting is compressed for added tension. The Gardner Museum displays it on a freestanding wall where it rests on a low shelf, so it’s even more in our face, projecting into our space. Behind it hangs a 17th-century Oriental carpet, turning the temp higher. It’s high theater. The Gardner’s curators have a taste for visualizing imbroglio.

After Esther accuses Haman and a titter goes through the room, the king leaves in a rage. Haman throws himself at Esther, crying and begging for mercy. When the king returns, he thinks that Haman was trying to molest her. That’s curtains for Haman. The genocide? The king doesn’t exactly cancel it. He leaves it in force but empowers Jews to raise a militia to kill Jew-haters near and far, which they do.

Haman had already ordered a pole, 75 feet tall, constructed so he could see Mordecai’s dead body dangling from it while he dined at the palace. Joke’s on him. The king orders him to be impaled on it. He also grants the Jews substantial new freedoms. Ten of Haman’s 30 sons are executed as well, the icing on the poppyseed cake. “For the Jews it was a time of happiness and joy, gladness and honor,” the Bible tells us, and it’s celebrated to this day.

The Gardner throws a bit of a curveball when dealing with the end of Esther’s story. The Met lent its splendid Man with a Turban, painted by Rembrandt in 1632. Rembrandt loved dressing up in costume, and Orientalism — probing the otherness of the Near East — was in style. The subject is exotic and grand, the antithesis of Dutch Burgher style. The Near East of legend was an age of decadence but also sumptuous style. The museum enlisted a fashion historian and used old Near Eastern textiles to give us a deep dive into the Dutch taste for Orientalist design as a sign of new Dutch wealth and worldliness. The little country was well on its way to becoming a maritime empire based on money and trade. And part of the Purim celebration is reenacting Esther’s drama not only by reading the Esther scroll but also by dressing up, eating, drinking wine, and giving Haman the na na na na hey hey-hey goodbye treatment.

Thou shalt not be wedded to a script. Rembrandt’s Self Portrait, Age 23 from 1629 isn’t exactly on point, but the Gardner owns it, so why not use it? He’s in costume, looking snazzy, and the Gardner does have two things to celebrate: The Book of Esther is, I was surprised to learn, its first exhibition of Old Master Dutch art, and the museum has also just finished renovating its splendid Dutch Room.