Hagar and the Angel

Details

MARCANTONIO FRANCESCHINI (BOLOGNA 1648-1729) AND STUDIO
Hagar and the Angel
oil on canvas, unframed
89 1/2 x 83 3/8 in. (227.3 x 211.7 cm.)

Provenance

Anonymous sale; Sotheby's, London, 11 December 1996, lot 42, where acquired by the present owner.

Literature

D.C. Miller, Marcantonio Franceschini, Turin, 2001, p. 197.

Special notice

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Conditions of sale

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Lot Essay

A popular subject in seventeenth-century Italian art, the story of Hagar and the Angel is taken from the Book of Genesis (21:14-19). Hagar, an Egyptian slave, gave birth to Ishmael, the child of Abraham, whose own wife, Sarah, was barren. Some years later, having had her own son, Isaac, Sarah forced Abraham to expel Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness of Beersheba. There, having run out of water and with her child facing death, Hagar prayed to God to save her. Accordingly, as is depicted in this painting, an angel appeared to Hagar and directed her to a source of water, thus saving her life and that of her son.

Marcantonio Franceschini, one of the leading painters in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in Bologna, treated this subject in a painting now in the Galleria Nazionale di Palazzo Spinola, Genoa, which was likely commissioned from the artist in 1696 by one Signor Girolamo Cavazza. The success of this composition is attested to by a number of replicas and variants, including the present work, which Dwight Miller in his 2001 catalogue raisonné of the artist (loc. cit.) suggests was produced in the studio and perhaps partially retouched by the artist himself.

The present composition differs significantly from the Genoa painting, most notably in its vertical rather than horizontal orientation as well as in the positioning of Ishmael, who rests in Hagar’s lap, cradled in her arms, rather than being sprawled on the ground beside her; this detail marks a departure from the Biblical text, which states that 'and she went, and sat down apart from him a good way off, as it were a bowshot; for she said, Let me not see the death of the child. And she sat apart from him, and lifted up her voice, and wept'.

Miller (loc. cit.) notes that the figures offer loose quotations of earlier seventeenth-century prototypes. The pose of the angel is derived from the figure of Romulus appearing to Proculus in the mural by Agostino Carracci in the Palazzo Magnani, Bologna, while that of Hagar looks to Guercino’s Death of Dido, now in the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, and that of Ishmael to Domenichino’s Death of Adonis in the Palazzo Farnese, Rome.

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