Hagar in the desert

Gheorghe Tattarescu learned to paint in Rome, copying Raphael and Guido Reni at the old academy there, and he came home to a Romania that was just inventing itself as a modern nation. When he made this Hagar in 1870, the two Romanian principalities had only recently joined into one country and were reaching for the trappings of a European state, a national art among them. The subject is from Genesis: Hagar, cast out into the desert with her small son Ishmael and no water, weeping until a well appears to save them. Tattarescu gives the scene the calm, polished finish he had absorbed in Italy, the grief kept graceful rather than raw. He was one of the founders of modern Romanian painting and had himself taken part in the revolution of 1848. The canvas is in the National Museum of Art in Bucharest.