CORP$EY
no mickey mouse ting
I guess I found it uncanny and mysterious when I didn't think of it as a story of an angel literally coming to save a woman in the wilderness. (But of course the story in the Bible IS a symbolic story.)
Without knowing that story I still understood the meaning - I suppose it felt more universal than a specific story. The despair of Hagar expressed not just in her expression but in the shadowy palette of the foreground, and then in the distance the angel approaching with the warm and bright palette of sunrise.
You're right that it's a landscape painting, and a landscape painting in which the landscape expresses the emotions of the figures within it (or what they represent). I suppose Corot uses the biblical story as a pretext for painting the landscape but also uses his skill as a landscape painter to express the emotions of that story more powerfully.
I like how in art history there's often multiple (to say the least) versions of the same biblical or mythological scene
e.g. https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/claude-landscape-with-hagar-and-the-angel Claude's take on hagar and the angel
