ASHER MILLER: Corot was known as a landscape painter, but in his time, pure landscape—that is to say landscape without figures—was more or less unthinkable. Figures animated a landscape, they gave it a purpose.

KEITH CHRISTIANSEN: This painting dates from 1835. The desperate woman at its center is Hagar, mistress of Abraham. Their son Ishmael lies next to her. Abraham’s wife, Sarah, had banished Hagar to this arid wilderness.

ASHER MILLER: Here in her moment of despair, nearly dying of thirst, she appeals to God, who sends an angel to direct her to a source of water. The figures in this painting are small in relation to their setting, but the overall scale is suited to the gravity of the subject, which comes from the Hebrew Bible. The landscape unfolds in accord with the narrative. In fact, Hagar and Ishmael are found at the outlet of a dried watercourse.

KEITH CHRISTIANSEN: Corot has situated the figures in a landscape that he studied from nature in a small canvas that is often displayed nearby. When the painting was exhibited in 1835, an anonymous critic singled it out for praise, writing:

ASHER MILLER: “The angel in that vast landscape, the distant hope that the despairing mother cannot see, that great landscape, this is what I find a noble and great idea, admirably realized. Thought, freshness, color, line, soul, spirit, movement—it is all there.”