Painting and Sculpture

Esther Before Ahasuerus (Tintoretto)

Esther Before Ahasuerus is a large painting of 1546–47 by the Venetian painter Tintoretto showing a scene from the Greek addition to the Book of Esther, in which Queen Esther faints during a bold intervention with her husband King Ahasuerus of Persia. In oil on canvas, it measures 207.7 by 275.5 centimetres (81.8 in × 108.5 in). Since the 1620s it has been in the Royal Collection of the United Kingdom, and in 2019 it hung in the King's Gallery in Kensington Palace, London. The degree of finish varies considerably between different parts of the painting, which, with the intense colours and dramatic contrasts in lighting, is characteristic of Venetian painting. The orange-yellow pigment orpiment in the robe of the king has altered; it would originally have matched the biblical description of his splendid gold robe. The painting is dated, largely on stylistic grounds, to about 1546–47, relatively early in Tintoretto's career, when he was still in his late twenties. It comes shortly before his first major commission, Saint Mark Rescuing the Slave, now in the Accademia, Venice.

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See also

• ▸Newspaper Readers in Naples
• ▸Bamberg Cathedral
• ▸Ha Bik Chuen

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Text from Wikipedia; plate via Wikimedia Commons. Text CC BY-SA 4.0; plate freely licensed (see Commons). Source record. Images and catalogue data are reproduced from open-access collections.