Blockbuster shows have their uses, I suppose. They boost much-needed museum revenues even if they make looking at art into a test of endurance and persistence. There’s more to be said for the blockbuster’s alternative: the small, focused exhibition that allows visitors to savor a comprehensible number of works, concentrate on their special characteristics, individually and as a group, and think about why they have been brought together. We emerge from the best of these intimate shows with our knowledge of art history enlarged, our preconceptions challenged, and our perceptions expanded. “Rembrandt and Degas: Two Young Artists,” a little gem of a show comprised of sixteen modest but potent works, is just such an exhibition, organized by the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, in association with the Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, Williamstown, MA, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, by the Rijksmuseum’s senior curator of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century paintings, Jenny Reynaerts.1 (There’s no catalogue, but there’s an excellent article, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Edgar Degas Inspired by Rembrandt,” by Ms. Reynaerts and Stella Versluis-Van Dongen in The Rijksmuseum Bulletin.)

Even in the wake of 2011’s trifecta of illuminating Degas shows—“Degas and the Nude” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; “Dancers at the Barre: Point and Counterpoint” at the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; and “Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement” at the Royal Academy of Arts, London—“Rembrandt and Degas: Two Young Artists”offers a fresh,