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“A gaze inward on consciousness, and upward each mother-and-child embodies a primordial yet opposing theme:
towards deity” (Sherwood, 1865): Overbeck staying versus leaving, sheltered embeddedness versus unpredictable
looking anew at the banishment of Hagar displacement, control over one’s fate versus exposure to the perils of
the unknown. It is a moment of intense fear and heightened drama,
An unwavering Romanticism also fueled Overbeck’s uncompromising which Overbeck, however, internalizes. Overt emotions yield to self-
striving for a complete oneness of work and life, of pious practice and possessed composure, action to interiority, as motherly love, familial
artistic production. “Here was a man,” the Reverend Sherwood told the courage and a mutual trust in God triumph over the story’s elements
American public in no uncertain terms, “who seemed to have entered of cruelty and despair. The elegant, muted color scheme supports the
the spirit-world to bring down to earth those forms of purity and beauty sense of balance, formal and otherwise, and overall atmosphere of
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which his canvas revealed.” If later modernists would declare impasto restraint. But Overbeck would not have been Overbeck if he had not
brushstrokes, fleshy corporeal materiality and an expressive use of added an exegetical twist to the passage from Genesis, while offering
color as the signature traits of the era’s most advanced art, Overbeck’s clear instructions how to view the scene (and thus his painting).
devotees yearned for materialized spirituality. “Each line is sensitive,
each form seems begotten in realms removed from this lower sphere, On the one hand, he reinterprets the Old Testament scene as a
the figures belong to worlds untainted by sin,” Sherwood gushed and prefiguration of the New, evoking a similar typology as Bendemann
concluded: “Taken for all in all, these works are perhaps the nearest had in his Captive Jews (See cat. 1), although the juxtaposition of
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approach to disembodied thoughts possible to pictorial forms.” the Synagogue’s dark vis-à-vis Ecclesia’s blond hair is now playing
Overbeck delivered on all of this when he finally, eleven years after out in the boys, not the female figures. The allusion to Christ is yet
receiving the commission, finished his version of Hagar’s banishment unmistakable, and as the now fair-haired Isaac reaches out for Sarah,
(See cat. 8). Commissioned only a year after The Triumph of Religion in who embraces him tightly but with perplexing solemnity, the group
the Arts, the project had languished in the shadow of the monumental doubles as a Madonna and Child. The lush vine, moreover, ties Isaac,
canvas for a decade. But its patron, a Hamburg senator, did not give the rightful heir to the Abrahamic tradition and covenant, not to Israel
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up, and rightfully so. Luckily for him, the wait would be worth it. but the future arrival of the Messiah who will shed his blood at the
cross to bring salvation to humanity. To understand this supersessionist
The scene from Genesis (21:14) had enjoyed great popularity among argument, we have to look carefully at each detail, at each reference to
artists across centuries and once more entered center stage in the late pictorial traditions, and adopt a devotional attitude. The instruction
18 century. It tells the story of Abraham, his wife Sarah and Hagar, to do so is, on the other hand, already built into the painting itself
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their Egyptian slave. God had promised Abraham many descendants, with the addition of the two anonymous observers situated at the
but Sarah remained barren nonetheless. At the verge of becoming back window. Although entirely extraneous to the story they are fully
too old to have children at all, she thus decided, in accordance with absorbed by it, pondering what they see. Engrossed in a deep if hushed
the custom of the day, to give her handmaiden to Abraham so she conversation, they invite us to do the same. Thinking about the picture
might bear him an heir. But after Hagar gives birth to Ishmael, Sarah on a metalevel, Overbeck thus inserted an unbiblical identification
herself becomes unexpectedly pregnant and also delivers a healthy template that models the ideal mode of reception: a devotional gaze
baby boy named Isaac. The years pass, and when Ishmael once day furbished by close attention to detail and quiet, meditative reflection.
mocks Isaac, Sara demands, worried over her son’s inheritance, that
Hagar and her offspring be cast out. At God’s command, a reluctant As Overbeck aged, his desire, as he confessed, “to avert distraction
Abraham obeys. Overbeck distilled the complex narrative into a as much as possible, and to concentrate thought on the subject of
scene of greatest clarity and universal symbolism. To that end, he contemplation” grew exponentially, and with it, an increasing dislike for
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divided and grouped the two women and their sons opposite each enthralling story-telling (Fig. 21). As an earnest devotional spirit had
other, as two closely intertwined units, with Abraham in the middle yielded to the liberal dramatization of scriptural subjects in the High
as the narrative’s fulcrum. Strangely united in their shared faith, Renaissance, he complained around 1850, art had lost its theological
grounding. He, for one, was determined to turn back the clock.

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