One of Rembrandt’s chief preoccupations was creating images that tell stories from history, mythology and the Bible. He studied this specialty and communicated his insights to his friends and the pupils in his busy workshop. This exhibition, selected and researched by 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 Govaert Flinck is one outstanding example, with its  rendering of divine light, and masterful orchestration of the astonished human reaction. In several sophisticated scenes, Gerbrand van den Eeckhout interprets his teacher Rembrandt’s 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 and built upon Rembrandt’s practice of history painting

David de Witt