After many years of marriage, the biblical patriarch Abraham and his wife, Sarah, were unable to conceive a child. Hagar became pregnant and gave birth to a son, Ishmael, when Abraham was eighty-six years old. When, several years later, Sarah eventually became pregnant and had a son, Isaac, household relations soured. Ishmael began to tease his younger half-brother, leading Sarah to insist that Abraham banish Hagar and Ishmael from the family home; the latter were forced to wander in the desert.
Sarah Leading Hagar to Abraham is one of only two biblical subjects painted by Caspar Netscher the other is Bathsheba , dated The Dismissal of Hagar, when Abraham is later forced to expel the Egyptian concubine and his first-born son, was treated on numerous occasions by Pieter Lastman β and his contemporaries, by Rembrandt van Rijn β69 , and by artists of the Rembrandt school. In its contrasting of the comforts of the home with the harsh uncertainties of the desert wilderness, the story served a moralizing purpose as well, reinforcing the primacy of the nuclear family and the importance of maintaining domestic order.
Not until the late s did the subject appear in paintings: three works by the Caravaggesque painter Matthias Stom ca. Compare, for example, the highly decorative effect of the lush Portrait of Caspar Ingels and Maria Christina Bartolotti van den Heuvel , , or a genteel genre scene such as Musical Company of fig 1. Sarah is no longer a haggard crone with clear links to the stereotypical image of the procuress, but a dignified and mature woman, an image more in keeping with her status as the mother of the Jewish nation.
Hagar, posed frontally and gazing directly at the viewer, appears oddly disconnected from the transaction that soon dramatically alters her life. Indeed, her attention seems focused entirely on the viewer. A servant peers from behind the canopied bed curtains at right, her eager spying echoing our own voyeuristic anticipation.
The support, a single piece of fine-weight, plain-weave fabric with tacking margins removed has been lined and mounted to a stretcher over a rigid paperboard. There is a paper label and a pencil inscription but no wax collection seals, stencils or import stamps along the paperboard or stretcher reverse.
