Gioacchino Assereto, 'The Angel appears to Hagar and Ishmael', about 1640

A woman seated in a rugged landscape is startled by the sudden appearance of an angel, who points to heaven while gesturing towards a sleeping boy in the distance. This is the angel appearing to Hagar, the Egyptian maidservant to Sara, wife of Abraham, as told in the Old Testament (Genesis 21: 17–19). Hagar bore Abraham a son, Ishmael, and was subsequently banished to the wilderness with her boy. When their supplies ran out and Ishmael was on the point of dying – a drinking vessel lies empty beside him – an angel appeared, pointing out a water source where they could drink and announcing to Hagar that her son would lead a great nation (the Ishmaelites). Hagar wears a gypsy’s hat in accordance with the long-established tradition of identifying Egyptians with gypsies – the same hat is worn by the woman holding the infant Moses in Bartholomeus Breenbergh’s painting The Finding of Moses, also in our collection.

This is a mature work by the Genoese painter Assereto. The picture’s fluid brushwork and strongly naturalistic style are typical of the artist. Assereto’s gesticulating figures and boldly cropped composition lend drama to this biblical scene, while the subdued tones and limited colour range echo the sombre mood demanded by the subject.

Assereto treated the theme of the angel appearing to Hagar in the wilderness earlier in his career, in a painting in Palazzo Rosso, Genoa. The subject is frequently represented in seventeenth-century paintings; compare, for example, Guercino’s deeply moving rendition or Claude’s exquisitely detailed painting illustrating the same moment in the story, both of which are in our collection.

This is one of two Genoese paintings in the National Gallery from the collection of Sir Denis Mahon (1910–2011), the great scholar and collector of Italian Baroque paintings. The other is Valerio Castello’s The Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist.