Divine Encounter: Rembrandt's Abraham and the Angels - Hardcover

In 1646, on a panel fewer than nine inches wide, Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) produced one of his most captivating images. In private hands and publicly exhibited only a handful of times, this extraordinary painting, Abraham Entertaining the Angels, is among the artist's lesser-known masterpieces and it is the inspiration for Divine Encounter. Rembrandt took an unusual and dramatic approach to Biblical subjects. He made use of the viewer's knowledge of the subject whilst finding ways to bring the familiar to life, a challenge he took on throughout his career. Abraham and the Angels is presented alongside a selection of Rembrandt's treatments of other biblical episodes in which Abraham encounters God and his angels. These are examined as a group, compared with versions by Rembrandt's contemporaries, and considered in relation to theological, philosophical and artistic debates of the period.

Joanna Sheers Seidenstein is the 2015-17 Anne L. Poulet Curatorial Fellow at The Frick Collection, New York. She is a doctoral candidate at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, where she is writing a dissertation on Rembrandt's treatments of themes from classical antiquity. From 2009 to 2014, she held the Institute's Kaplan-Fisch Fellowship in the Connoisseurship of European Paintings. At The Frick Collection, where she has worked since 2002 as a Curatorial and Research Assistant, she has contributed to such publications as Goya's Last Works (2006), The Spanish Manner: Drawings from Ribera to Goya (2010), and Rembrandt and His School: Masterworks from the Frick and Lugt Collections (2011). In 2015, she organized the exhibition Landscape Drawings in The Frick Collection.