For more than 100 years now, the Frans Hals Museum has been able to strengthen its collection thanks to the support of the Rembrandt Society. This presentation celebrates this close bond. In 2011, with the help of members of the Rembrandt Society, the museum purchased the painting The Queen of Sheba before the temple of Solomon by the Haarlem-based artist Salomon de Bray (1597-1664). This painting clearly shows the fascination 17th-century architects had for a legendary Biblical edifice.

In the 17th-century, many Dutch architects regarded Solomon’s Temple as the perfect image of architecture. According to the Bible, King Solomon received instructions from God Himself for the shape and dimensions of the new temple. Symbolic comparisons with this Old Testament building became popular in the Netherlands, especially in the mid-17th century, the period in which the Eighty Years’ War was coming to an end. In the Biblical story, King Solomon had the temple built in a period of peace during which the ‘true’ faith prevailed, which 17th-century Dutch leaders were eager to use as an example in their time.

Thousands of Rembrandt Society members have contributed to the purchase highlighted here, as well as to the more than eighty stunning museum purchases of the past ten years , which can currently be admired untill 3 February 2019 in the exhibition entitled For the Love of Art at the Kröller-Müller Museum in the village of Otterlo. Parallel to that large exhibition, there are smaller ‘satellite’ presentations in several Dutch museums, of which this is one of them. The presentation is shown in the ‘pronkkamer’ in location Hof. Entrance is only possible with a ticket to Frans Hals and the Moderns.