The Expulsion of Ishmael and His Mother
Gustave Doré, 1866 · Genesis 21:14
The passage
And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and took bread, and a bottle of water, and gave it unto Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, and the child, and sent her away: and she departed, and wandered in the wilderness of Beersheba.
Genesis 21:14
About this plate
Flat open desert under a hard white sky. Abraham stands at the left with his staff, cloaked, bearded, and his right arm is out straight, pointing away. Hagar walks off to the right with a two-handled water jar balanced on her head and one hand up steadying it. The boy walks pressed against her, holding her hand and her robe. Back at the tent a woman sits among the sheep with a child. Far off on the right edge there is a palm and a line of small figures.
Everyone in this plate is doing something except Hagar, who is only walking. Abraham points, Sarah sits and holds, the boy clings. Dore gives Hagar the one gesture that cannot be argued with and no one to make it to. Her face is turned slightly down and away from the arm that is sending her.
The verse is a list of what Abraham handed over: bread, a bottle of water, and the child. The King James sentence puts the bottle on her shoulder and then says and the child, which is loose enough that painters have read the boy onto her shoulder too. Dore does not. He puts the jar up top and the boy on his own two feet, holding on.
Ishmael is drawn as a small child here. By the arithmetic of Genesis he was a teenager.
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