Gioacchino Assereto

In the National Gallery in London, a mother sits startled in the desert beside her sleeping son while an angel points to the sky. This is The Angel appears to Hagar and Ishmael, painted in Genoa around 1640 by Gioacchino Assereto, one of the leading history painters in the city. It reached the gallery in 2013 from the collection of Denis Mahon, the British scholar and collector who spent a lifetime championing Italian Baroque painting.

Assereto started early. He entered the studio of the Genoese painter Luciano Borzone at 12 and moved to Giovanni Andrea Ansaldo's workshop around 1614. A visit to Rome in 1639 brought him into contact with the realism of Caravaggio's followers, and his later pictures turned bolder and more theatrical, with the fluid brushwork and subdued colour of the Hagar.

He did well at home. The Genoese biographer Raffaele Soprani called him incomparable, and in the 1640s Assereto painted frescoes for the church of Sant'Agostino while his studio, his son Giuseppe among them, turned out copies of his pictures. He died in Genoa in 1649, and his Death of Cato hangs today in the city's Palazzo Bianco.