Circle of Bartholomeus Breenbergh, Abraham Dismissing Hagar, 1630s

Hagar was the Egyptian maid of Sarai, wife of the biblical patriarch Abram, whose story is told in the Book of Genesis. After ten years of childless marriage, Sarai urges Abram to take Hagar, who eventually bears him Ishmael (Genesis 16, RSV). Thirteen years after the birth of Ishamel an angel appears and commands that he and his wife change their names to Abraham and Sarah; the angel also announces that Sarah will bear a son, Isaac (Gen. 17). After Isaac is born, Sarah demands that Abraham send Ishmael and Hagar away. Abraham is displeased, but God speaks to Abraham saying, "Be not displeased because of this...for through Isaac shall your descendants be named. And I will make a nation of the son of the slave woman also, because he is your offspring." Early the next morning, Abraham gives bread and water to Hagar and Ishmael and sends them away into the wilderness of Beersheba (Gen. 21:10-14).

The popularity of the story in seventeenth-century Dutch art may be explained on several grounds. In part, it had to do with the strong identification of the inhabitants of the newly created Dutch Republic--especially the 150,000 refugees who had recently resettled there from the Spanish Netherlands--with the "chosen people" of the Jewish bible and the Christian Old Testament, who, guided by God, had journeyed to the promised Land (Waal, pp. 22-23; Schama, pp. 93-125). This identification prompted requests for paintings that depicted episodes from the lives of the biblical patriarchs such as Abraham. The popularity of this particular story may have also been spurred by a demand for a new kind of religious painting, one less concerned with scenes of miracles and martyrdom (as adorned altars in Catholic churches) than with moments of psychological and moral complexity: scenes of family crisis, departure, separation, recognition, and reconciliation, which were suitable for displaying in Protestant homes (Tumpel, pp. 142-46).

Breenbergh's subject might also have had specific appeal because it embodies themes that preoccupied seventeenth-century Dutch social and moral critics: the importance of the patriarchal family; and the need to distinguish between the rights of married and common-law wives, and between the rights of legitimate and illegitimate children. In a country where many households included at least one maidservant, a recurrent theme in popular literature and the arts was the danger posed by maidservants to the well-being of the legitimate family. One need only think of the many genre paintings by Jan Steen of "unruly households" and of the figure of the flirtatious maid (Schama, pp. 455-60).

Typically, depictions of Abraham dismissing Hagar engage the issue of the maidservant/ mistress from a graver and more compassionate perspective. Works of art by Pieter Lastman (circa 1583-1633) and notably his pupil, Rembrandt (1609-69), draw attention to the human suffering that unfolds when the aging patriarch casts out his mistress and their son (Hamman, pp. 471-587). Wellesley's painting, possibly by a follower of the landscape painter, Bartholomeus Breenbergh (circa 1598-1600-57), draws upon that pictorial tradition; but this painting elicits a fresh interpretation of the story by underscoring the brutality of Abraham's action. Whereas Lastman and Rembrandt depict him in such a way that his face and gesture register his own suffering and feelings of attachment to the outcasts, this artist shows the shaded figure of Abraham from the back, with his arm outflung as he orders Hagar and the crying Ishamel to depart (Tumpel and Hecht, pp. 24-25).

In the Wellesley panel the figures are set in front of a landscape with ruins, similar in style to the "Italianate" Dutch landscapes of Breenbergh and Cornelis Poelenbergh (1586 or 1596-1667). Though at the time of its acquisition in 1968, Abraham Dismissing Hagar was thought to have been painted by Breenbergh, its attribution has more recently been doubted (Blanker, p. 87; Roethlisberger, p. 103). Unusual for Breenbergh is the upright format, the relatively large scale of the figures within the composition, and the way in which the figures block a view into the distant background.

Professor Margaret D. Carroll, Art History Department

Click here for reference information

Click here for archives of previous artworks of the month