The Festival of Purim (La fête de Purim); Interior of the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam

Balthasar Bernaerts

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

One of the symbols of the wealthy Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the magnificent Portuguese Synagogue, a building that still stands today and looks much the way it does in this print. Here Dubourg illustrated the community gathered there for Purim, a Jewish holiday celebrated to commemorate the deliverance of the Jews from the massacre plotted by Haman. In the foreground, people of varying classes talk with each other while in the background many men have draped prayer shawls over their fashionable caps as they partiicpate in the service.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art