Hagar in the Wilderness

Corot sent this large canvas to the Paris Salon of 1835, aiming at the most respected category a painter could enter, biblical history. The story is a harsh one. Hagar, the servant of Abraham, has been driven into the desert with their young son Ishmael, and she collapses, dying of thirst, until an angel appears overhead to point her toward water. But Corot's real love was landscape, and it shows. The bleached, rocky wilderness is largely invented, worked up in the studio from oak trees and boulders he had studied out in the forest of Fontainebleau near Paris. The two small figures are almost swallowed by it. One of those Fontainebleau oak studies hangs today in the same museum, a few rooms from the desert it helped him imagine.