Image Not Available
for Nicolaes Maes
Nicolaes Maes
Dutch, 1634 - 1693
Dutch painter. The son of the prosperous Dordrecht merchant Gerrit Maes and his wife Ida Herman Claesdr., Nicolaes Maes learnt to draw from a ‘mediocre master’ (Houbraken) in his native town before he studied painting with Rembrandt in Amsterdam. His training in Rembrandt’s studio must have taken place between 1648/50 and 1653. By December 1653 Maes had settled in Dordrecht and made plans to marry, while a signed and dated picture of 1653 confirms that the 19-year-old artist had completed his training and embarked on an independent career. Maes continued to reside in Dordrecht until 1673.
1. Work.
(i) Genre and history paintings.
Maes’s few pictures of biblical subjects and all his approximately 40 genre paintings date from c. 1653 to c. 1660. Though indebted to Rembrandt’s example, the early religious works exhibit a precocious originality in the interpretation of the sacred text and iconographic tradition. For instance, in the Expulsion of Hagar (1653; New York, Met.) Hagar’s inconsolable response to her dismissal and the characterization of Ishmael as a prematurely embittered outcast mark it as one of the most poignant renderings of a theme that was especially popular among Rembrandt’s students. This and other biblical pictures are of cabinet size; Christ Blessing the Children (London, N.G.) is Maes’s only religious work with lifesize figures.
For a brief period in the mid-1650s Maes ranked among the most innovative Dutch genre painters, owing to his talent for pictorial invention and for devising expressive poses, gestures and physiognomies. He adapted Rembrandt’s brushwork and chiaroscuro to the scenes of domestic life that provided the favourite subject-matter for genre artists working in the third quarter of the century. The poetic deployment of light and shade and the adeptly designed figures invest his paintings of interior scenes with women absorbed in household tasks with an atmosphere of studious concentration. In pictures of spinners, lacemakers (e.g. The Lacemaker, 1655; Ottawa, N.G.) and mothers with children, dating from 1654 to 1658, household work assumes the dignity and probity claimed for it by contemporary authors of didactic literature on family life. Maes also executed a small group of works that show everyday events taking place on the doorstep of a private house. Some depict milkmaids ringing the doorbell or receiving payment for a pot of milk (e.g. London, Apsley House); others represent boys asking for alms from the residents. As in the interior scenes, Maes’s pictorial gifts transformed these mundane transactions into events of solemn dignity. Another type of genre painting from the mid-1650s shows a single, nearly lifesize female figure in half or three-quarter length. An elderly woman says grace before a modest meal, prays amid vanitas symbols or dozes over a Bible (e.g. Brussels, Mus. A. Anc.), exemplifying, respectively, spiritual vigour and spiritual lassitude in old age.
Maes’s most renowned genre paintings feature an interior with an eavesdropper who exposes the peccadilloes of another member of the household (e.g. London, Apsley House). Dated or datable between 1655 and 1657, the six pictures of eavesdroppers and the closely related Idle Servant (1655; London, N.G.) and Woman Picking the Pocket of a Sleeping Man (Bangor, North Wales, Lady Janet Douglas-Pennant priv. col., see Sumowski, 1983, fig.) employ gentle satire and an ingenious narrative structure to ridicule the vices of sloth, lust or anger. The eavesdropper or other principal figure smiles engagingly at the viewer and directs attention to a housewife scolding her husband, a kitchen maid asleep on the job or a servant entangled in the embrace of a lover. In these pictures and in the Woman Plucking a Duck of 1655 or 1656 (Philadelphia, PA, Mus. A.), Maes developed an innovative approach to the representation of interior space. He was among the first Dutch genre painters to depict the domestic interior not as a shallow, three-walled box but as a suite of rooms. His new disposition of domestic space resulted primarily from the narrative requirements of these paintings. While he demonstrably perused perspective handbooks, he resorted neither to a mathematically constructed space nor—with one exception—to trompe l’oeil illusionism. Maes pursued his experiments for only a brief period (1655–7), but his achievement exercised a decisive influence on the Delft painters Johannes Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch and thus had lasting consequences for the representation of interior space in 17th-century Dutch painting.
(ii) Portraits.
While concentrating on his genre and history paintings, Maes embarked on a productive, 35-year career as a portrait painter. During the second half of the 1650s, when his output of subject pictures gradually diminished, his production of portraits steadily increased. Some 25 single, pendant and group portraits from the period 1655–60 have been preserved.
However, from c. 1660 until the end of his career, Maes worked exclusively as a portraitist. He settled in Amsterdam in 1673, making a bid to fill the vacancy left by the deaths of the portrait specialists Bartholomeus van der Helst and Abraham van den Tempel. Soon, wrote Houbraken, ‘so much work came his way that it was deemed a favour if one person was granted the opportunity to sit for his portrait before another, and so it remained for the rest of his life’. Hundreds of surviving portraits from the 1670s and 1680s corroborate Houbraken’s report. Most are pendants in one of two favourite formats: a smaller rectangular canvas with a half-length figure within a painted oval; and a larger canvas with a three-quarter-length figure, usually shown leaning against a fountain, rock or column. In both types, the setting is often a garden or terrace before a sunset sky. There are several group portraits of children or families, depicting the sitters full length in landscape settings, but only one corporate group, the Six Governors of the Amsterdam Surgeons’ Guild (1680–81; Amsterdam, Rijksmus.), is known.
2. Working methods and technique.
(i) Paintings.
During his 40-year career, Maes’s painting technique evolved continuously, but his exceptional skill with the brush never faltered. In the genre and history pictures of the prolific period 1653–5, his colour, chiaroscuro and brushwork owe a clear debt to Rembrandt’s work of the mid-1640s, particularly to the latter’s Holy Family in the Carpenter’s Shop (1645; St Petersburg, Hermitage). Maes restricted his palette to blacks, browns, whites and reds and employed techniques ranging from a meticulous ‘fine painting’ style in the description of wooden furniture or a wicker cradle to a grainy—occasionally even pastose—application of richly graduated tones in the execution of fabric and flesh. After the middle of the decade, he increasingly favoured a clearer light, smoother textures and more definite contours.
The early portraits developed differently. Apart from the evocative shadows that enrich a few of them, they scarcely recall the legacy of Rembrandt’s teaching. Rather, Maes initially accommodated his style to the conservative Dordrecht tradition represented in the 1650s by Jacob Gerritsz. Cuyp, his son Aelbert Cuyp and the older Rembrandt pupil Samuel von Hoogstraten. Simple frontal poses, restrained conventional gestures, sober facial expressions, dark clothing rendered with tones of white, black and grey, and plain backgrounds or austere domestic settings characterize Maes’s first essays in this field, dating from 1655–7 (e.g. the portrait of Jacob de Witt, 1657; Dordrecht, Dordrechts Mus.). In the portrait of the Dordrecht shipper Job Cuijter and his Family (1659; Raleigh, NC Mus. A.), which shows the family on a quay in Dordrecht harbour, Maes began to employ the lighter tonality, the pale red hues and the white highlights that also distinguish his latest subject picture, Winter and Spring (c. 1659–60; Oxford, Ashmolean).
Maes’s mature style developed gradually during the 1660s in response to the Flemish mode of portraiture developed by van Dyck and introduced into the northern Netherlands in the previous decade by such artists as Govaert Flinck, Adriaen Hanneman and Jan Mijtens. From the early 1660s onwards, Maes regularly employed staging and accessories derived from Flemish portraiture. Although Houbraken reported that Maes once travelled to Antwerp, direct contact with Flemish painting contributed less to his development than his study of works by Mijtens, whose colouring and technique evidently inspired the glistening reds and blues and brilliant brushwork of his later paintings. Despite the general trend of his style, in some of his most sympathetic portraits of the 1660s Maes continued to utilize a plain background and a subdued palette (e.g. the Portrait of a Widow, 1667; Basle, Kstmus.).
The portraits of the 1670s and 1680s generally feature the same imaginary garden or architectural setting with a foreground composed of columns, fountains, terraces and billowing curtains, but they exhibit a novel repertory of graceful poses and refinements in technique and colouring. The pale, solidly modelled countenances preserve—according to Houbraken’s reliable testimony—an accurate likeness of the sitter, but the brilliantly rendered hair and clothing increasingly dominate the image. Satiny fabrics in a broader and brighter range of reds, blues, oranges, golds and violets shimmer with dashing, scumbled highlights, while the elaborate curls of the period’s long hairstyles are described with a breathtaking show of tonal painting in greys and browns (e.g. the Portrait of a Young Man; Munich, Alte Pin.).
(ii) Drawings.
About 160 drawings by Maes have survived, making him one of the few outstanding Dutch genre painters of his generation whose practice as a draughtsman can be partially reconstructed. Many are working drawings, both compositional sketches and figure studies, for his genre and history paintings—only one rough design for a portrait survives (Besançon, Mus. B.-A & Archéol.), along with a few landscape drawings. For the compositional projects Maes used a variety of media: red chalk, pen and ink and combinations of chalk and wash or ink and wash. Most are cursory sketches, for example the study in pen and wash (Berlin, Kupferstichkab.) for The Lacemaker (1655; Ottawa, N.G.). The figure studies also exhibit a wide variety of media and techniques. They range from spare contours delineated with the pen or brush to exquisitely refined studies in red chalk (e.g. another study, Rotterdam, Boymans–van Beuningen, for The Lacemaker) to broadly pictorial drawings executed in a combination of chalk, ink, wash and bodycolour.
3. Patrons and followers.
While early collectors of Maes’s subject pictures remain unidentified, the known sitters in his portraits attest that in this field Maes enjoyed from the outset the patronage of Dordrecht’s political and mercantile élite. Jacob de Witt, whom he portrayed in 1657, was a member of the city’s Old Council and the father of Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt, the political leader of the United Provinces. A contract of 1658 records that Maes acquired a house from Job Cuijter in exchange for a cash payment and the portrait of Cuijter with his family. In 1659 or 1660 Maes painted a portrait of Jacob Trip (The Hague, Mauritshuis), the first of several pendant portraits with Trip’s wife Margaretha de Geer (both of whom were portrayed by Rembrandt about the same time). Among Holland’s wealthiest families, the Trips and de Geers amassed fortunes from Swedish iron mines and the manufacture of armaments.
During his last years in Dordrecht and during his Amsterdam period, Maes continued to work for a varied clientele at the highest social levels, including the Utrecht University professor of theology Gijsbert Voet; the preacher Cornelis Trigland; Hieronymus van Beverningk, Treasurer-General of the United Provinces, diplomat and one time close confidant of Johan de Witt; the Amsterdam burgomaster Gerrit Hendriksz. Hooft; the Lieutenant-Admiral of Zeeland, Cornelis Evertsen; Laurent de Rasiere, a sea-captain in the service of the West India Company; and the Rotterdam burgomaster, silk-merchant and director of the East India Company Jan de Reus. A few of these portraits were reproduced in prints.
Maes’s closest followers were the Dordrecht painters of portraits and genre scenes Reinier Covijn and Cornelis Bisschop (1630–74). Bisschop studied with Ferdinand Bol, but Covijn may have been Maes’s pupil. Houbraken mentioned four minor artists as Maes’s students: Jacob Moelaert (1649–c. 1727), Jan de Haen, Johannes Vollevens (1649–1728) and the poetess Margaretha van Godewijk (1627–77).
William W. Robinson. "Maes, Nicolaes." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T053067 (accessed May 8, 2012).
Person TypeIndividual
