Zerubbabel showing Cyrus the plan of the Jerusalem temple

Although acquired in Paris in 1989, this work has been in Orléans at least since the 17th century, when it belonged to the collection of Aignan Thomas Desfriches (1715-1800). An artist who remained an amateur, and founder of the Orléans School of Drawing and Museum, he was one of the most important Enlightenment scholars to have contributed to the city's major artistic development. This work bears witness to his taste for Nordic painters. Jacob van Loo's career was divided between Holland and France. Living in Amsterdam from 1641 onwards, he moved to Paris twenty years later and was admitted to the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in 1663, becoming the first of a dynasty of painters that marked French artistic life until the 19th century. The treatment of the painting betrays the artist's classical and Italianate inclinations. The subject, described in the Old Testament at the beginning of the Book of Ezra, depicts the Judean prince Zerubbabel presenting the Achaemenid ruler Cyrus with a plan for the reconstruction of Jerusalem, which the latter had authorized after allowing forty thousand captive Jews to return to their homeland. The painter groups the figures together, their expressions and gestures restrained, in front of the large drapery of an improvised canopy. This way of referring to the crowd at Cyrus' court, the golden-brown atmosphere of the scene and the shimmering colors of the costumes are characteristic of the artist. No doubt intended for an enlightened collector, the painting is a pretext for a display of orientalist anecdotes, through the heavily banded heads - a sort of synthesis between the Ottoman turban and the Dutch beret - and moustaches, the sonorous colors of the costumes and the Persian king's golden throne.