Esther and Haman before Ahasuerus

In the second half of the 1630s Rembrandt ran a busy workshop in Amsterdam, and young artists came to him to learn how to stage a Bible story. Jan Victors, born in the city in 1619, is usually counted among them, although the link rests on the look of his pictures, with no document to prove it. This large canvas, painted around the end of that decade, shows the climax of the Book of Esther. At a banquet she has prepared, the queen tells the king that his chief minister Haman is plotting to wipe out her people. Ahasuerus, in a white turban, points across the table, and Haman throws up both hands. In 1642 Victors painted the very next moment of the story, the minister begging Esther for his life, on a canvas now in Braunschweig.