Landscape with Hagar and the Angel

Sir George Beaumont, an amateur painter and collector, loved this small canvas so much that he took it with him wherever he travelled. When he gave his pictures to the new National Gallery in 1826, he asked to keep this one until he died, and it arrived only in 1828. The young John Constable saw it in Beaumont's collection, and its upright shape, framed by a tall tree, fed into his own Dedham Vale of 1802. The subject is Hagar, the Egyptian servant who bore Abraham a son and fled into the wilderness, where an angel finds her and points her back the way she came. Genesis puts the meeting by a spring in the desert. Claude gives her green country like the land around Rome, with a broad river. The angel's robe was once yellow, and as that colour has faded the blue beneath shows through.