Hagar and Ishmael in the Desert

Claude's Hagar and Ishmael in the Desert presents the desperate scene of Genesis 21:15-19 - Hagar placing her dying son under a bush and withdrawing so as not to see his death, when God opens her eyes to see a well of water - as a vast sunlit landscape in which the tiny human figures are dwarfed by Claude's characteristic atmospheric perspective. The golden light that suffuses the scene, emanating from the horizon, functions as a visual metaphor for the divine response of Genesis 21:17 ('God heard the boy crying, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven') - the light of divine attention breaking through apparent abandonment. Claude's pastoral-biblical landscapes gave 18th-century viewers and patrons an experience of the Old Testament's providential geography.