Rejection of Hagar

The story of Hagar's rejection appears in Genesis 21, when Abraham sends his concubine Hagar and their son Ishmael into the wilderness at Sarah's insistence. Maes treated this Old Testament subject in 1657, during the height of his Rembrandt-influenced genre-biblical period — the years immediately after his training with Rembrandt in Amsterdam when he produced a series of intimate domestic-religious scenes. Unlike the grand rhetorical gestures of history painting, Maes conceived the scene as a human moment of anguish: Hagar's distress, Abraham's conflict, Sarah's hard determination. The Gemäldegalerie Berlin work shows the psychological subtlety that distinguishes Maes's early period from his later fashionable portraiture. The choice of a domestic interior or transitional threshold setting gives the episode the compressed emotional intensity of Dutch genre painting while honouring its biblical gravity.

Maes employs the warm earth tones and strong chiaroscuro absorbed from Rembrandt's studio, with figures emerging from deep shadow into focused light that models drapery and face simultaneously. The paint is applied with confident, expressive brushwork in the shadow areas and tighter, more controlled strokes at the points of greatest emotional focus — the faces and hands.