Nicolaes Maes
(1634 - 1693) |
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Portraiture, Genre Subjects, Social Narratives Art Work
| Name: |
Nicolaes Maes |
| Gender: |
Male |
| Place of Birth: |
Dordrecht |
| Nationality: |
Dutch |
| Birth: |
1634 |
| Death: |
1693 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
Portraiture, Genre Subjects, Social Narratives |
| Medium: |
Oil on canvas |
| Method: |
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| Style: |
Dutch Baroque |
| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painter
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Biography
| Maes is the best-known pupil from Rembrandt's* mature phase whose reputation rests largely on one aspect of his oeuvre: his domestic genre scenes, a subject matter which seems to have occupied him only briefly, from around 1654 to 1659. One work from this period, Interior with a Sleeping Maid and Mistress (The Idle Servant) (signed and dated 1655, London, National Gallery), is one of the earliest known representations of a daily life scene with a view into another room, a topic explored a few years later with such rich results by Pieter de Hooch.* Some scholars tend to think the two artists knew each other, but this is uncertain. Though Maes's reputation is based largely on the small body of surviving genre pictures, he did spend a great deal of his time painting portraits, producing them almost exclusively after 1660 for well over thirty years. These polished works, executed for the most part in a mannered style (influenced by France and Flanders), are today regarded as more shallow and less appealing than his genre paintings. In fact, his portraits are so different in style from his genre subjects that for many years it was thought that two different artists named Maes produced them. Born the son of a textile merchant in Dordrecht, Maes first studied with a Dordrecht master of middling talents and then (perhaps at the advice of Samuel van Hoogstraeten) traveled to Amsterdam to study with Rembrandt. The year of his entrance into Rembrandt's atelier is not known, though most scholars suggest around 1650. Maes was back in Dordrecht by 1653, the year of his earliest known signed and dated work, the recently published Abraham Dismissing Hagar and Ishmael (signed and dated 1653, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art). In 1654 he married the widow Adriana Brouwers and they had three children. In 1658 he bought a house. Houbraken mentions that Maes traveled to Antwerp to see the works of Rubens and van Dyck;* the date is unknown but estimated to be around 1660. By 1673 Maes moved to Amsterdam and remained there until his death. Maes's early works rely heavily on Rembrandt's interpretation of character, his warm lighting, and his compositional structure - elements that Maes always made an active part of his work. The emphasis of a strong diagonal movement (certainly part of most seventeenih-century artists vocabulary) is particularly emphatic in Maes's paintings, defining spatial recession and guiding the viewer explicitly to the main points of interest in his images. Rembrandt's biblical themes inspired many of Maes's early paintings, but around 1654 he began to explore scenes of domestic life in which he often selected the monumental presence of a single figure as a focus. Other elements (often quite literal anecdotal details) were secondary and carefully selected to sharpen the picture's meaning. Gradually Maes evolved his own interpretation of the human face, which was at once more explicit and somehow more literal than Rembrandt. Though certainly not shallow, Maes's depictions of people do not reverberate with Rembrandt's great sense of humanity. Maes developed his own palette, favoring rich blacks and touches of red and white. One of his most universally celebrated masterpieces is the Woman at Prayer (signed, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum), which is saved from sentimentality by its sincerity, but which describes a daily ritual rather than a deeply religious experience. In 1655 Maes began to produce portraits and concentrated almost exclusively on portraiture after about 1660. His palette lightened and his manner of presentation changed. He adopted the fashionable elegance and graceful poses associated with cultivated society. Though some critics (Houbraken, for example) regarded Maes as one of the greatest painters of likenesses ever, his portraits remain so much a part of their own time that they are not nearly as celebrated as his more universally admired genre works. |
Samples of Work
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