Hagar Meeting the Angel in the Desert

The messenger who stops a death

The angel of the Genesis desert scenes is called the angel of the Lord, an office rather than an individual: he speaks in the first person for the one who sent him and is never given a name or a place in the nine orders. His task in the Hagar episode is intervention at the last possible moment. Three titles in this catalogue turn on Hagar, and each names the angel only by that generic office.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1650 and gives Ferdinand Bol, a Dutch painter, with Baroque as the style term. The recorded dimensions are 100 x 117 cm. The measured colour family is brown. No location is recorded.

Meeting as the verb

This title uses a verb that the tradition's other Hagar entries do not: meeting. A meeting implies two parties arriving, which is a different account of angelic function from an apparition descending on a person who did not seek one. The distinction is in the wording of the record, not in anything visible, and it is the kind of thing a catalogue can honestly compare. No location is recorded for this entry.