The feast of the esters
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| The feast of the esters |
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| Jan Lievens , ca.1625 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 130.8 x 163.8 cm |
| North Carolina Museum of Art , Raleigh |
The Feast of Esters is an oil painting by the Dutch painter Jan Lievens . The work with life-size half-figures is executed in landscape format on canvas and has beenattributed to Pieter Lastman , Rembrandt van Rijn and Arent de Gelder in the past.
description
The painting shows a key scene from the Book of Esther in the Jewish Tanakh and the Christian Old Testament : Esther has just told King Ahasuerus about Haman's betrayal, who wanted to have her and her entire people murdered. In the next instant the king will get up in anger and leave the table. A servant stands in the background. Possibly it is Harbona who will point out the gallows erected for Mordechai in front of the house after the return of the king ( Esther 7 EU ).
In the center of the painting, the Persian Queen Ester sits at her banquet table, on which silver dishes, bread and a pie can be seen. She wears a blue and white dress and gold jewelry, including a diadem, a bracelet and several gold necklaces, one of which has a pendant with a large emerald. Ester is illuminated by light coming in from the top left and is therefore recognizable as the main character. She has turned to her husband, King Ahasuerus, and points with her left hand at the traitor Haman. The king is seated in an armchair to the right of the table. He wears a splendid cloak over a red and white robe and a brightly striped wide bandage, which is trimmed with gold brocade on the outside and lined with ermine fur on the inside and is held together with a large ruby with a gold clasp. The king wears a white turban adorned with a golden diadem, feathers and a second ruby set in gold. Ahasuerus is also seized by the light, he fixes Haman, his arms spread out slightly and his fists clenched in anger. On the left of the picture is Haman, who is also sitting in an armchair and is only shown from behind. he wears a red robe with black stripes and a black beret trimmed with red feathers with a notched rim. He looks at his king and backs away, with his right arm raised in defense. In the background to the right, between Esther and Ahasuerus, is a fourth person. It is a servant or court official who also wears a black beret with red feathers, notched at the edge, a light blue robe, a white scarf and a wine-red cloak. He too looks at the accused Haman. The left half of the background is taken up by a light curtain, from which Haman's silhouette stands out in stark contrast. To the right, the color of the curtain changes from almost white to purple in order to provide a dark background for the figures standing there and illuminated by the light.
The painting has the format 130.8 × 163.8 cm and is painted in oil on canvas and has been relined . There are some nail holes on the left edge. The canvas consists of two parts, the connecting horizontal seam is about 65 cm from the lower edge. The canvas has 13 to 15 threads per centimeter horizontally and 14 to 15 threads per centimeter vertically. This points to an emergence in the second or third quarter of the 17th century. In various places, especially on Ahasuerus' turban, the gray primer shines through slightly. Examined material samples showed that the primer has a high oil content and is a mixture of dark brown pigments , white lead , some ocher and a very fine black pigment. The picture is in a good overall condition. Loss of color was retouched in several places, especially on the left edge with the nail holes, which was verifiably turned over once. There are areas of coarse craquelure distributed over the entire picture , especially in the light areas.
The Kupferstichkabinett Dresden houses a drawing attributed to Jan Lievens, which is considered a draft for the feast of the Esters . The drawing shows the three main characters sitting less crowded at the table, with Ahasuerus on the left, Haman on the right and a dog in the foreground. Elements such as the ester pointing to the traitor and the curtain in the background are already present in this design. The color scheme of the painting with the contrasts between purple and pink on the one hand and light blue and gray-blue on the other, as well as the brightly striped sash of Ahasuerus are reminiscent of the school of the Utrecht Caravaggists from 1620. This also corresponds to the densely packed depiction of half-figures, whose most important actors are illuminated and next to which the person remaining in the semi-darkness acts as a repoussoir and reinforces the impression of depth. All of these are elements that also distinguish Jan Lievens' Card Player, also painted around 1625 .
interpretation
The Book of Esther, its description of the Jewish suffering under Persian bondage, and the triumph of the Jews over their enemies, was one of the most popular books of the Old Testament in the United Netherlands . The plot was understood as a biblical model of the struggle of the Calvinist Netherlands against Catholic Spain and the independence they had achieved. In this idea and in its numerous implementations in literature and painting it was expressed that the Persians or Spaniards are enemies of God, and the Jews or Dutch can be sure of God's favor.
While earlier Catholic depictions of the Book of Esther focused on Ester's intercession with Ahasuerus or the triumph of Mordechai, the focus in Dutch painting of the early 17th century was more on the violent aspects, such as the confrontation between Haman and Ahasver at Ester's banquet or the Ask the traitor Haman for mercy. Jan Lieven's Feast of the Esters fits into this phase, while Rembrandt's much later adaptations of the theme partly show traditional iconography.
- Queen Esther in the work of Rembrandt
The Triumph of Mordechai , around 1641, etching, 17.5 × 21.5 cm, Rijksprentenkabinet , Amsterdam
Haman asks Esther for mercy , 1635/1660, oil on canvas, 234.8 × 187.5 cm, Muzeul Național de Artă al României , Bucharest
Ahasver and Haman at the Feast of Esther , 1660, oil on canvas, 71.7 × 93.2 cm, Pushkin Museum , Moscow
reception
In the 1937 English edition of the catalog raisonné by Abraham Bredius , the painting with the number 631 is listed as authentic and described as one of the great compositions from Rembrandt's very early period. The attribution to Rembrandt has been confirmed over decades by art historians such as Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner and Seymour Slive . Kurt Bauch listed the painting in 1966 with the number A 1 as not authentic; Rembrandt probably only painted the faces in a work otherwise by Lievens. The employees of the Rembrandt Research Project (RRP) included the work in the first volume of their Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings in 1982 in group C of those paintings that are definitely not by Rembrandt.
An attribution to Lastman goes back to Gerard Knuttel and was probably based on only one of Lastman's works, which resembled the feast of Esther with the depiction of half-figures and the lighting . It was the victim of Manoach and his wife , which was destroyed in the fire of the Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam in 1864 . Julius Held took the view that the picture was neither by Rembrandt nor by Lievens, but by another unknown painter. The employees of the Rembrandt Research Project dated the painting to around 1625 and ascribed it to Jan Lievens, who was then just 18. This ascription is now generally accepted.
Provenance
The painting first appeared in the B. Sommelinck art dealer in Ghent. On December 16, 1936, it was auctioned by the Brussels auction house J. Fiévez as a painting signed and dated 1632 by Arent de Gelder . From 1936 to 1939 the painting was offered as Rembrandt by the art dealer P. de Boer in Amsterdam. Until 1952 it was owned by the art dealer Charles Albert de Burlet from Basel and then by the Schaeffer Galleries in Berlin and New York City. In the same year it was sold to the North Carolina Museum of Art.
Exhibitions (chronological)
- North Carolina Museum of Art , Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. Exhibition Rembrandt and his pupils. A loan exhibition , November 16 to December 30, 1956
- Museum De Lakenhal , Leiden, Netherlands. Exhibition portrayed dead Leyden in 1626 , November 18, 1976 to January 9, 1977
- Duke Anton Ulrich Museum , Braunschweig. Exhibition Jan Lievens. A painter in the shadow of Rembrandt , September 6th to November 11th 1979
- Rijksmuseum Amsterdam , Netherlands. Exhibition God en de goden , May 16 to July 19, 1981
- Altes Museum , Berlin. Rembrandt exhibition . The master and his workshop , September 12 to November 10, 1991
- National Gallery of Art , Washington, DC, USA. Exhibition Jan Lievens. A Dutch master rediscovered , October 26, 2008 to January 11, 2009
- North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. Exhibition Rembrandt in America. Collecting and connoisseurship , October 30, 2011 to January 22, 2012
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research Project (Ed.): A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings. I. 1625-1631. Martinus Nijhoff, Den Haag, Boston, London 1982, ISBN 978-94-009-7519-4 , Work C 2 Esther's feast , pp. 446-460.
- ↑ a b c d Madlyn Kahr: Rembrandt's Esther. A painting and an etching newly interpreted and dated. In: Oud Holland - Journal for Art of the Low Countries 1966, Volume 81, No. 1, pp. 228-244, doi: 10.1163 / 187501766X00360 .
- ↑ Abraham Bredius (Ed.): The Paintings of Rembrandt. Allen & Unwin, London 1937 (cited as Bredius ), work no.631.
- ↑ Kurt Bauch : Rembrandt. Painting. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1966, reprint 2018, ISBN 978-3-11-005007-3 , No. 42.
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↑
Gerard Knuttel: Rembrandt's Earliest Works . In: The Burlington Magazine 1955, Vol. 97, No. 623, pp. 44-47, p. 49, JSTOR 871508 .
Vitale Bloch: The Problem of the Early Rembrandt (Letter to Knuttel, and his answer). In: The Burlington Magazine 1955, Vol. 97, No. 629, pp. 259-260, JSTOR 871760 . - ^ Kurt Freise: Pieter Lastman. His life and his art. A contribution to the history of the Dutch. Painting in the XVII. Century Klinkhardt and Hermann, Leipzig 1911, digitized .
- ↑ Jan Lievens, Esther accuses Haman during her meal with Assuerus (Esther 7: 1-17), ca.1625 on the website of the RKD - Nederlands Instituut voor Kunstgeschiedenis , accessed on August 31, 2019.