Agar e Ismael en el desierto

Undated but consistent with Esquivel's mid-career production, this canvas depicting Hagar and Ishmael in the desert — an Old Testament subject drawn from Genesis — belongs to the tradition of Romantic religious and biblical painting that found in the Hebrew Bible a source of dramatic human subjects alternative to the New Testament. The story of Hagar, the Egyptian handmaiden of Sarah who was expelled into the desert with her son Ishmael after Sarah bore Isaac, offered painters a triangulation of motherhood, exile, and divine intervention that resonated with Romantic themes of abandonment and redemption. Murillo had painted the subject twice, and Esquivel's Sevillian formation would have made him intimately familiar with both compositions. The Museum of Romanticism in Madrid holds the work, contextualising it within the broader Romantic cultural movement rather than in a specifically religious collection — a curatorial decision that reflects how biblical subjects were received in the mid-nineteenth century as emotional rather than strictly devotional statements.

The composition foregrounds the emotional relationship between mother and child against a desolate landscape rendered in warm ochres and sandy browns. Esquivel models the figures with his usual warm flesh-tone system, contrasting their human warmth against the arid desert setting. The landscape background is handled more loosely than the figures, consistent with his hierarchy that places human subjects above environment.