Summary: Spanning the late 1630s to the late 1650s, the works in the exhibition trace a shift in Rembrandt’s approach to biblical subject matter. In them, the artist took a progressively deeper interest in the psychological content of the Abraham story, specifically the emotional experience of a father confronting the most magnificent of blessings and the most heartbreaking of losses. At the same time, Rembrandt also began to move away from the physicality and instantaneity of his earlier narrative work in favor of imagery characterized instead by an overwhelming sense of stillness and calm. These are the defining qualities of his 1646 Abraham Entertaining the Angels, in which the momentous nature of the event depicted is conveyed solely through light and a single, gently raised hand. This pivotal work in the artist’s career depicts an episode from chapter 18 of Genesis in which Abraham and his wife, Sarah, are visited by three travelers. These strangers reveal their divine status when one of them announces, to the aged woman’s disbelief, that she will give birth to a son in a year’s time. This is the third instance in the Bible in which God appears—the text is explicit—to Abraham. What the patriarch actually saw and how to represent it were, however, matters of interpretation. In the 1646 painting and in a later etching of 1656 depicting the same episode, Rembrandt directly addressed this question, exploring in two very different ways the nature of divine presence and human perception thereof...

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