From the museum website, 21 January 2014
Curator: Dr Stephanie Dickey, Bader Chair in Northern Baroque Art, Queen’s University, with students from Topics in Northern Renaissance & Baroque Art (Art History 446) with special contributions by Christopher Zakos, and graduate students Kirsten Christopherson, Emily Kakouris, Casey Lee, Jane Mann, Laura Schemitsch, Nina Schroeder and Yvonne Tristani.
One of Rembrandt’s chief preoccupations was creating images that tell stories from history, mythology and the Bible. He studied this specialty and went on to communicate his insights to his friends and the pupils in his busy workshop. This exhibition, selected and researched by internationally reknowned Rembrandt scholar and Queen’s professor Stephanie Dickey and a team of students, draws on the Bader Collection’s strength in narrative paintings by artists from Rembrandt’s immediate circle. Manoah’s Sacrifice by Govert Flinck is one outstanding example, with its stunning rendering of divine light bursting through clouds, and masterful orchestration of the astonished human reaction. In several sophisticated scenes, Gerbrand van den Eeckhout masterfully interprets his teacher Rembrandt’s calmer aesthetic of the 1640s. Studying his late works, rich in evocation of inner thought and painterly effects, Aert de Gelder created affectingly candid earthy tableaux. With these and other remarkable paintings, this exhibition shows how these artists, major talents in their own right, transformed Rembrandt’s practice of history painting into a wide and diverse phenomenon.