A small winged figure flies down out of the sky.
Bible in art · Genesis
Hagar in the Wilderness
Corot · 1835
The Met, New York
Camille Corot showed this large landscape at the Paris Salon of 1835. He painted it in his Paris studio, using studies he had made in the hills around Rome a few years before.
The story is told by tiny figures in a vast, sunlit wilderness. In the lower right Hagar kneels beside her son, one hand to her head, the other raised, while a small angel flies down through the sky.
From the text
- Hagar wandering with the boy in the Wilderness of Beersheba (Genesis 21:14)
- The boy lying on the ground after the water is gone (Genesis 21:15)
- The angel of God calling to Hagar from heaven (Genesis 21:17)
The artist’s own
- The dry hills and rocks of the Roman countryside for the wilderness
- An angel with wings flying down, where the text has a voice from heaven
- The landscape as the real subject, the people very small
Details
The angel
Hagar
She kneels in a dark robe, one hand on her forehead, the other lifted.
The boy
Ishmael lies on his back on the bare ground.
Yellow cliffs
Broken cliffs of sunlit rock, of the kind Corot drew near Rome.
Spiky plants
Aloe-like plants and scrub among the boulders.
Camille Corot, French, Paris 1796–1875 Paris. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Rogers Fund, 1938; acc. 38.64) · Oil on canvas · Public Domain — The Met Open Access (CC0). The Met Collection API record: "isPublicDomain": true; The Met marks such works on its website "with the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) icon".