Rembrandt’s Lions: Art and Exile in the Dutch Republic

At The Morgan Library & Museum, “Rembrandt’s Lions: Art and Exile in the Dutch Republic” considers how images traveled alongside displaced people in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. The exhibition centers on Rembrandt and his circle, using the recurring figure of the lion to trace ideas of power, belonging, and vulnerability in a society shaped by migration and religious conflict. In New York, it reads as a timely study of how art absorbs political pressure without reducing it to allegory. One clear takeaway is how a single motif can carry multiple, unstable meanings across audiences.