dreamy Nicolaes Maes... a National Gallery London exhibition

Since studying C17th Dutch Art as an undergraduate at Melb­ourne Uni, I have been passionate about genre scenes. Jan Vermeer was and is my favourite, followed by Pieter de Hooch, Gerard ter Borch, Gabriël Metsu and others. Earlier this year an exhibition called Nicolaes Maes: Dutch Master of the Golden Age opened in the National Gallery London, but under coronavirus conditions. The exhibition ends at the end of Sept 2020!

Nicolaes Maes (1634-93) was the son of a wealthy merchant. At 15 he moved from Dordrecht to Amsterdam to do an appren­t­ice­ship with Rembrandt, and become one of the master’s most gifted pupils. In 1653, Maes went back to Dord­recht to live. He married Adriana Brouwers, widow of a cleric, in 1654 and had 3 chil­dren. Until c1660, Maes painted genre scenes in the same style as Rembrandt, with chiaro­scuro and warm colours.

Maes produced most of his small-scale paintings of dom­estic int­er­iors in the 1654-60 era, favouring images of women spin­n­ing, read­ing or preparing a meal. These small scaled works retained the use of Rembrandtian colour.

His genre pieces had a hushed ch­ar­acter. Maes depicted mothers with children, or older women praying or sleeping. For example Maes painted a young thinking woman rest­ing an elbow on a window-ledge. Girl at a Window (1653-5) showed her looking through a wood­en wind­ow shutter that was flung open. And yet, as the girl viewed the outside, her background was black. Humble realism of the Dut­ch Golden Age, to be sure.

The dark room in A Woman Scraping Parsnips 1655 might have seemed bare but the painting enclosed the two figures in warmth. The concent­ration of woman and child, their gaze directed intently downwards, focused on the woman’s teaching hands. No ‘beating the devil out of a child’ here; just a gent­le attitude towards the child’s education. Domestic calm was always the desired end.

Perhaps Maes’ contemp­orary, Johannes Vermeer, was rich in hidden drama. His refined genre paintings also depicted women working in rooms, domestic mysteries and secret gl­ances. He pulled back the curtain on a private realm, figurat­ively and literally; there was a curtain rail in front of the picture with a green silk curtain partly pulled back.

Maes was literally map­ping new territory since in many of his gen­re scenes, there was a detailed wall map that displayed the Nether­l­ands’ proud geography. Note its precarious coastline that was won from the North Sea. The National Gall­ery said Maes “discovered interior worlds”, analogous to how cartog­raphers charted the outer world.

His genre scenes were filled with detailed household implements and at least a second person. Maes painted The Eaves­dropper 1657, a wo­man standing at the bottom of a staircase with a hushed finger to her lips. There was a map, half-visible in the dull ­light. Below her, lovers were caught in the ce­l­lar, rev­ealed by a servant’s lant­ern.

This exhibition showed Maes overcoming the crushing influence of Rembrandt by mainlining reality. It was the scientific revolution, and the age of Dutch global commerce. The Account Keeper 1656 show­ed a woman dozing at her ledger. Above her hung a map of the world. Was she doing the books for a merchant house with inter­ests in Mug­hal India and Japan? The big houses Maes painted were surely those of just such merchants. His sharply lifelike portraits inclu­ded that of Jan de Reus, a director of the Dutch East India Co.


Some art historians have presented Maes as a coarse materialist who gave the Dutch elite what they wanted. But this exhibition revealed his depths. His paintings of everyday life were “little novels” that all­owed the viewer to go behind the scenes of a noisy and busy city, to explore private homes. Far from compl­ac­ent celebrations of Dutch capital­ism, these interiors were in well-functioning families.

The exhibition explored the depths of the Dutch Golden Age artist whose paintings were as “rich in hidden drama as any theatre”. But the 2020 exhibition did not cover the later period when Maes moved home, switched to portraiture and was influenced for the ?first time by Flemish art. Maes’ portraits were ad­ap­ted to the fash­ion of the day: smoother, detailed, lighter and with more col­our. This proved suc­c­essful and Maes was soon much in demand.

In 1673 Maes returned to Amsterdam and began a creative era in portrait painting. Compared to the small number of history and gen­re paintings that existed, it demonstrated how Maes understood art AND business. The third exhibition room was dedicated to portraits, showing how his style developed to reflect late C17th’s prevailing fashion. He created extravagant backgrounds to complement the sit­t­ers’ heroic poses. In Por­trait of a Boy as a Hunter a young boy stood in class­ic­al cos­tume with a perched bird and a leaping dog. In Portrait of a Girl with a Deer, a girl in a bright blue dress was standing with a deer in a forest. His por­traits reflected the trend towards a decorative and brighter style.

Bart Cornelis, curator of Dutch & Flemish Paintings 1600-1800, said “In the early C19th the appetite for Maes’ works among Brit­ish coll­ectors was such that many of his most celebrated genre pictures end­ed up in the UK, still found in both public and private coll­ect­ions. This was the first time they were assembled under one roof so that vis­itors could once again discover how Maes was one of Rem­­b­r­andt’s most important pupils. And how he paved the way for the next gener­ation, Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer.”

Try to get Nicolaes Maes: Dutch Master of the Golden Age, by Ariane van Suchtelen et al, published by National Gallery Co London, 2019.