The Banishment of Hagar

Completed around 1840 and now held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Banishment of Hagar is one of Overbeck's rare excursions into Old Testament narrative. The subject — Abraham sending Hagar and the infant Ishmael into the desert at Sarah's insistence — had been treated by Dutch and Italian Baroque masters as a drama of human cruelty and divine providence, but Overbeck transforms it into a scene of restrained pathos, the anguish of separation communicated through pose and expression rather than theatrical gesture. His acquisition of a work by the Metropolitan situates this painting within one of the world's great encyclopedic collections, where it stands as a prime example of German Nazarene easel painting for American audiences. The subject's theological complexity — the rejection of one covenant branch to secure another — suited Overbeck's lifelong preoccupation with the typological relationship between Old and New Testaments.

The composition likely separates the standing Abraham from the departing Hagar and child, using landscape to emphasise the exile's vulnerability. Overbeck's oil technique renders the desert setting with flat, symbolic simplicity rather than geological accuracy, keeping emotional weight on the figures.