Esther and Ahasuerus
Geldorp Gortzius(Leuven 1553 – ca. 1619 Cologne)

1612
oil on panel
56.5 x 72.4 cm
Signed with monogram (partially legible) anddated in white paint in upper-right corner:
F[ecit]A[nno] [FA in ligature] 1612 / […]GG-100© 2024 The Leiden Collection

Esther and Ahasuerus
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How to cite
Van Tuinen, Ilona. “Esther and Ahasuerus” (2019). In The Leiden Collection Catalogue, 3rd ed. Edited by Arthur K.
Wheelock Jr. and Lara Yeager-Crasselt. New York, 2020–23. https://www.theleidencollection.com/archive/ (archived
December 2023).
A PDF of every version of this entry is available in this Online Catalogue's Archive, and the Archive is managed by apermanent URL. New versions are added only when a substantive change to the narrative occurs.

The beautiful Queen Esther is one of the most important Jewish heroines in the Old

Comparative Figures

Testament. In the rich and complex Book of Esther, set during the Babylonian
captivity of the Jews, the queen braves her own death in order to save the Jewish
people by approaching her husband, the austere Persian King Ahasuerus. Though
Ahasuerus had chosen his wife without knowing she was Jewish, and Esther had
never revealed her secret, she knew that she had to acknowledge her Jewish heritage
when her husband’s wicked minister, Haman, decreed that all Jews be killed.
Fortunately, when she came into the king’s presence to invite him to a banquet,
Ahasuerus lowered his scepter, a sign that “she found favor in his sight” (Esther 5:2).
At the banquet, to which Esther also invited Haman, she revealed both her Jewishbackground and the minister’s evil plan (Esther 7:1–10). Because of his unwavering
love for his wife, Ahasuerus ordered that Haman be killed and the decree nullified,thus preventing the annihilation of the Jews.[1]Traditionally, depictions of scenes from the book of Esther showed either theFig 1. Geldorp Gortzius, Portrait ofJeremias Boudinois, 1610, oil on panel,
103 x 81 cm, Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam, Jonkeer J. de Witte vanCitters Bequest, The Hague, SKA-916

dramatic encounter at Ahasuerus’s crowded court, with the king seated high on his
throne and Esther obediently kneeling down in front of him (see JvS-100), or the
moment at Esther’s banquet when she reveals Haman’s plan to Ahasuerus.[2] In thispreviously unpublished representation of Esther and Ahasuerus, the Flemish artist
Geldorp Gortzius abandoned all reference to the biblical narrative, and insteademphasized the tender interaction between husband and wife. Geldorp depicted
Esther and Ahasuerus as bust-length figures situated close to the picture plane. With aloving expression, Ahasuerus has put his left arm around Esther’s shoulder while heoffers her the golden scepter. In return, Esther looks up at her husband devotedly

Fig 2. Geldorp Gortzius, Susanna andthe Elders, 1600–1604, oil on panel,
47.5 x 70.5 cm, Museum of Fine Arts,
Budapest, inv. no. 86.3

while she cradles his scepter with both hands. Geldorp’s intimate representation might© 2024 The Leiden Collection

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well have been inspired by the first-century historian Flavius Josephus’s widely
known Antiquities of the Jews, in which Ahasuerus “leaped from his throne, and took
[Esther] in his arms, and recovered her, by embracing her, and speaking comfortably
to her, . . . [telling her] not to suspect any bad consequence on account of her coming
to him without being called, . . . but that she, who was a queen, as well as he a kingmight be entirely secure.” Significantly, Josephus goes on to say that Ahasuerus “putthe scepter into her hand.”[3]The couple’s richly appointed attire leaves no doubt of their regal status. Esther isdressed in a brown fur mantle with a split at the shoulder revealing a white satin gown
embroidered with patterns of gold. A crown and diadem with pearls and preciousstones shimmer amidst her brown curls. Strings of pearls, too, adorn her neck andwrists. Ahasuerus wears a deep red mantle over a dark green tunic trimmed with aFig 3. Geldorp Gortzius, The Penitent
Mary Magdalen, n.d., oil on panel, 67
x 52 cm, Mauritshuis, The Hague, inv.
no. 319

golden collar inlaid with a ruby and pearls. His golden crown, the tips of which extend
to the upper edge of the panel, is also garnished with pearls.[4]Geldorp was primarily a portrait painter whose oeuvre mainly consists of single
portraits, sometimes as part of a pendant pair, such as the 1610 Portrait of Jeremias
Boudinois in the Rijksmuseum (fig 1).[5] His rendering of the protagonists as bustlength figures in the present work is typical of his relatively few history paintings.
One finds a similar composition in his two other Old Testament works, Susanna andthe Elders in Budapest (fig 2) and David and Bathsheba in Cologne.[6] Such portraitlike history paintings do not appear in the oeuvres of Geldorp’s teachers, FransFrancken the Elder and Frans Pourbus the Elder.[7] The artist’s development of thisnovel compositional formula may have been rooted in his primary focus on
portraiture. It may have also been related to his experience in Cologne, where he lived
from 1579 until his death, and the wishes of wealthy clients who favored his portrait
style.[8] The affluent Cologne banker and art collector Everhard Jabach III(1567–1636), for instance, owned portraits by Geldorp of himself and his wife, aswell as a Susanna and the Elders—likely the one now in Budapest (fig 2). Horst Vey
has convincingly proposed that Jabach may have helped determine the composition of
the latter.[9]The fine line between Geldorp’s portraits and history paintings inevitably begs thequestion as to whether Esther and Ahasuerus was intended as a portrait historié. In thecase of Esther, her idealized facial type suggests that she was not intended to fulfill
this purpose. In fact, Geldorp had already used the same figure of Esther, with analmost identical expression, more than twenty years earlier for his Mary Magdalene in
1589.[10] The same formula recurs in an undated painting of the Penitent Mary
Magdalene in the Mauritshuis (fig 3).[11] Indeed, throughout his career, this same
figure type reappears in a number of single-figure paintings, ranging from Mary
© 2024 The Leiden Collection

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Magdalene and the Virgin Mary to the antique and mythological heroines Lucretiaand Venus.[12] In these renditions, Geldorp made only minor variations in the figure’sdress, hand gestures, and attributes.
Ahasuerus’s features, on the other hand, are less idealized than those of Esther, andhis facial type does not appear elsewhere in Geldorp’s oeuvre. He is depicted as a manof roughly the same age as Esther, quite unlike the description of him in written andpictorial accounts. Although this could indicate that Geldorp created a portrait historié
exclusively for a male patron, it is hard to imagine a scenario in which a sitter would
have wanted to be portrayed as Ahasuerus without his wife serving as the model forEsther. Also, the specificity of Ahasuerus’s appearance does not necessarily link him
to conventional portraits such as the one of Jeremias Boudinois (fig 1). In thisrespect, Ahasuerus can perhaps best be compared to Geldorp’s Four Evangelists fromaround 1605 in the Catharijneconvent, Utrecht, who all have strikingly differentfeatures, but who fit comfortably in the idiom of stylized renditions of historicalfigures.[13]The unusual presence of the halo above Esther’s head raises further questions about
the identification of the subject. Traditionally, Old Testament figures are not depictedwith haloes because they are, after all, not saints.[14] Indeed, Geldorp did not include
haloes when he portrayed the Old Testament heroines Bathsheba and Susanna, nor in
his paintings of Lucretia and Venus. The only New Testament scene that features aqueen and a king holding a scepter is that of Christ Crowning the Virgin, but in suchan instance Christ also would be portrayed with a halo. Esther’s halo in the presentpicture might be connected to the typological tradition of her intercession withAhasuerus; her efforts to save the Jews were likened to the Virgin’s intercession withGod for the salvation of mankind. In the Biblia Pauperum, one of the most wellknown medieval typological sources, for example, this association is illustrated by thejuxtaposition of Esther and Ahasuerus with the Coronation of the Virgin.[15]Reinforcing this relationship may have appealed to Geldorp’s predominantly Catholicclientele in Cologne, resulting in this exceptional portrayal of the Old Testamentheroine.

- Ilona van Tuinen, 2019© 2024 The Leiden Collection

Esther and Ahasuerus
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1. See the entry in this catalogue for Jan van Stavaren’s Esther before Ahasuerus (JvS-100) for a more
traditional rendition of the scene, as well as a more elaborate account of the story.
2. For an influential sixteenth-century example of the former, see, for instance, Philips Galle’s 1564
engraving after Maarten van Heemskerck’s design of Esther before Ahasuerus, 202 x 245 mm (BritishMuseum, London; see JvS-100, fig. 4). For a contemporary depiction of the Feast of Esther, see PieterLastman, The Feast of Esther, ca. 1610–19, oil on panel, 52 x 78 cm (National Museum, Warsaw).
3. Flavius Josephus, Antiquitates Judaicae, ca. 93–94 AD, book 11:6:9. English translation by William
Whiston, The Works of Flavius Josephus, the Learned and Authentic Jewish Historian (Belfast, 1841),
305.
4. Interestingly, the painting retains all four original bevels and has not been reduced in size, indicating thatthe present composition is identical to Geldorp’s original work. See the Technical Summary.
5. The pendant is the Portrait of Lucretia del Prado, 1610, oil on panel, 105 x 80 cm (Rijksmuseum,Amsterdam). Both portraits, along with seven others by Geldorp of the same family with ties toMiddelburg, entered the Rijksmuseum’s collection as part of the substantial De Witte van Cittersbequest. See Gerdien Wuestman, “Het familjie boeckje van Pieter Boudaen Courten (1594–1668):
Memoires van een geportretteerde,” Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 53 (2005): 42–61.
6. For the dating of Susanna and the Elders to ca. 1600 on the basis of a print by Crispijn de Passe and apainting by Melchior Geldorp dated 1605, see Horst Vey, “Susanna und die Ältesten von Geldorp
Gortzius in Budapest,” Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 48/49 (1987/1988): 187–213. The David andBathsheba, oil on canvas, 58.5 x 80 cm (Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne) is dated 1602. To thepresent author’s knowledge, these are the only Old Testament stories Geldorp produced. Geldorp also
depicted single New Testament figures and saints as close-up half-figures. For Geldorp’s four paintingsof the evangelists, see Paul Dirkse, “Vier evangelisten geschilderd door Geldorp Gortzius,” in Begijnen,pastoors en predikanten. Religie en kunst in de Gouden Eeuw (Leiden, 2001), 15–19.
7. For Geldorp’s training, see the biography by Piet Bakker in this catalogue. Both Pourbus and Francken,
like Geldorp, were predominantly portrait painters, but their history paintings contain various figures
and a distinct narrative focus. See, for instance, Frans Pourbus the Elder, David and Abigail, ca.
1570–79, oil on panel, 101.8 x 157.2 cm (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). Incidentally, Pourbus
painted this work during the decade that Geldorp was his student, which may help to explain why thefacial types of Pourbus’s David and Abigail are similar to those in the present work. See also Frans
Francken the Elder, The Adoration of the Magi, ca. 1600, oil on copper, 28.3 x 35.8 cm (Herzog AntonUlrich Museum, Braunschweig).
8. For Geldorp’s status as favorite portraitist of the Cologne upper class, see Ilja M. Veldman, “Keulen als
toevluchtsoord voor Nederlandse kunstenaars (1567–1612)”, Oud Holland 107, no. 1 (1993): 34–58,© 2024 The Leiden Collection

Esther and Ahasuerus
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9. Horst Vey argued that Jabach’s decision to commission Geldorp Gortzius to portray this scene wasconnected to Jabach’s personal motto, “Virtue above all” (German: “Die Tugend lebt über den Todhinaus”). See Horst Vey, “Susanna und die Ältesten von Geldorp Gortzius in Budapest,” Wallraf-RichartzJahrbuch 48–49 (1987–88): 197. Jabach may have requested a depiction of this scene without any
possible distractions, as in Geldorp’s closely framed bust-length version, so as to keep the focus on hismotto. It is not clear whether Jabach owned the Susanna and the Elders in Budapest or another versionof this work. Considering the high level of repetition in Geldorp’s oeuvre, it is likely that thecomposition was similar, if not the same.
10. Attributed to Geldorp Gortzius, Mary Magdalene (?), 1589, oil on panel, 51 x 41 cm (location unknown;
auctioned at Hargesheimer & Günther Kunstauktioned Düsseldorf, 16 January 2010, no. 64, unsold).
Though it is not entirely certain whether this painting was executed by Geldorp, the composition iscertainly typical for the master, and must have been designed by him.
11. Geldorp Gortzius, The Penitent Mary Magdalene, n.d., oil on panel, 67 x 52 cm (Mauritshuis, TheHague); see Quentin Buvelot, Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis: A Summary Catalogue (Zwolle, 2004),
124–25, no. 319.
12. See attributed to Geldorp Gortzius, The Madonna in Prayer, oil on panel, 50.6 x 42 cm (locationunknown; auctioned at Sotheby’s Olympia, 8 April 2003, no. 148 [unsold]); Geldorp Gortzius, Lucretia,
oil on panel, 59.6 x 48.9 cm (location unknown; formerly collection Mrs. S.M.C. Jungeling, The Hague,auctioned at Arts & Antiques Group, 7 May 2012, no. 16); Geldorp Gortzius, Venus, oil on panel, 59.9 x
50 cm (Art Market; Christie’s Amsterdam, 8 May 2012, no. 55 [unsold]).
13. The four paintings include John, 1604; Marcus, 1605; Matthew, 1606; and Luke [n.d.], each oil on panel,ca. 82 x 64.5 cm (each Museum Catharijneconvent, Utrecht). See Paul Dirkse, “Vier evangelisten
geschilderd door Geldorp Gortzius,” in Begijnen, pastoors en predikanten. Religie en kunst in de Gouden
Eeuw (Leiden, 2001), 15–19.
14. Haloes were reserved for saints and figures from the New Testament.
15. See Avril Henry, Biblia Pauperum: A Facsimile Edition (Ithaca, 1987), 117, with commentary on 119.
The third scene that is represented in this context is that of Solomon Enthroning His Mother Bethsabee.
On the Speculum humanae salvationis, another important typological source, see Horst Appuhn,
Heilsspiegel: Die Bilder des mittelalterlichen Erbauungsbuches Speculum humanae salvationis (Dortmund,1981), 73, with commentary on 112–13, where the connection between Esther and the Virgin asintercessors is illustrated by the juxtaposition of Esther and Ahasuerus with Mary Showing Christ Her
Breasts.

Provenance© 2024 The Leiden CollectionPowered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

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Joseph Topin, Aix-en-Provence, France, around 1840 (as by Battoni).
Félix Vieil, art dealer, Aix-en-Provence, around 1900; by descent to his granddaughter, Aix-enProvence; (Sale, Christie’s, Paris, 15 November 2006, no. 306; [Jack Kilgore & Co., Inc., New York]).
From whom acquired by the present owner, 2007.

Exhibition History
Amsterdam, Hermitage Amsterdam, “Rembrandt and his Contemporaries: History Paintings from The
Leiden Collection,” 4 February–27 August 2023, no. 27 [lent by the present owner].

References
Wheelock, Arthur K., Jr., Christiaan Vogelaar, and Caroline van Cauwenberge. Rembrandt and His
Contemporaries: History Paintings from The Leiden Collection. Exh. cat. Amsterdam, Hermitage
Amsterdam. Zwolle, 2023, 122–25, no. 27. [Exhibition catalogue also published in Dutch.]

Technical Summary
The painting was prepared on a single plank of horizontally grained wood. All four edges of the reverse are
evenly beveled, indicating that the panel retains its original size. The panel was prepared with a thin, whiteground that does not obscure the texture of the wood grain. The paint was applied in thin layers, with low
brush marks and glazes.
Infrared reflectography did not reveal any underdrawing, except for a small change to the fingers of Esther’s
proper left hand. A glossy but well-saturating varnish covers the surface. The varnish has been disturbed
along the edges where it came into contact with the frame rabbet.
The painting has not been treated since its acquisition and remains in a good state of preservation.[1]Technical Summary Endnotes

1. These technical notes are based on a technical examination report by Annette Rupprecht, dated
November 2011.

© 2024 The Leiden Collection