Nicolaes Maes (1634-1693)

Portrait of a lady by Dutch Golden Age painter Nicolaes Maes (1634-1693). Half-length, within a feigned oval, the lady wears a pearl necklace and earrings, an ivory silk gown adorned with pearls with a crimson cloak, her dark brown hair dressed in the fashionable ringlet style of the period. She is presented against a landscape setting at dusk. Traces of signature bottom right. Circa 1671.

This is a classic example of Maes portraiture technique and style at the height of his powers as the leading portrait painter of his time in the Netherlands. The sitter was in all likelihood the daughter or wife of a wealthy merchant in Amsterdam (known as 'Burghers'), part of the affluent rising class keen to display their new found prosperity and success through commissioning portraits of their family wearing clothes made from luxurious fabrics and fine pearl jewellery.
The painting is registered as by Maes in the RKD records (Netherlands Institute for Art history) in The Hague, no. 150163.

Oil on canvas in a dutch style ebonised frame.

Nicolaes Maes was one of Rembrandt's most talented pupils. As a boy of about thirteen or fourteen, he left his parents' home in Dordrecht to serve his apprenticeship with the master in Amsterdam. He spent four or five years in Rembrandt's workshop, returning to Dordrecht in 1653 as a fully-fledged artist. Maes started out as a ‘history’ painter, following in Rembrandt's footsteps, but he soon switched the focus of his activities to genre painting of intimate and detailed domestic scenes. In a short period between 1654 and 1658 he was one of the most innovative painters in this field.  His skill at representing an interior as a suite of rooms rather than a three-wall, one-room enclosure, and the true-to life details and intimate nature of his paintings had great impact on the Delft painters Johannes Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch.

Arnold Houbraken's 1721 biography described the transformation: Maes "learned the art of painting from Rembrandt but lost that way of painting early, particularly when he took up portraiture and discovered that young ladies preferred white to brown."

Maes painted his first portraits in 1655, and shortly before 1660 he stopped painting genre works and other paintings altogether, concentrating solely on portraiture, eventually developing a colourful and elegant style that appealed to a broad circle of wealthy clients in Dordrecht, Amsterdam and beyond.
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