N i co l ae s Mae s
n i co l a e s mae s
Nicolaes Maes Ariane van Suchtelen Bart Cornelis Marijn Schapelhouman Nina Cahill
Mauritshuis, The Hague National Gallery Company, London Waanders Publishers, Zwolle
At the Mauritshuis the exhibition is very generously supported by the Friends of the Mauritshuis Foundation, Nationale-Nederlanden, part of NN Group, the Dutch Masters Foundation and the Prince Bernhard Culture Fund. At the National Gallery the exhibition is generously supported by The Thompson Family Charitable Trust and the Bernard Sunley Foundation.
Contents
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Directors' Preface
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Lenders
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Nicolaes Maes – Innovation and Versatility Ariane van Suchtelen
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Apprenticeship with Rembrandt – Maes and History Painting Ariane van Suchtelen
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c atalog ue 1–5 Bart Cornelis and Ariane van Suchtelen Genre – Picturing Everyday Life Ariane van Suchtelen c atalog ue 6–2 1 Bart Cornelis, Ariane van Suchtelen and Nina Cahill A Career as a Portraitist Ariane van Suchtelen c atalog ue 2 2–3 5 Bart Cornelis, Ariane van Suchtelen and Nina Cahill
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On Nicolaes Maes as a Draughtsman Marijn Schapelhouman
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Nicolaes Maes – Timeline Notes to the Essays Provenance, Literature and Notes to the Catalogue Entries Literature
Directors' Preface
This catalogue accompanies the first major loan exhibition ever devoted to Nicolaes Maes (1634–1693), the highly skilled and distinctive pupil of Rembrandt, best known for his scenes of slumbering kitchen maids and prying women set in well-appointed Dutch interiors. British collectors showed a special interest in the painter’s works and so it is particularly appropriate that the National Gallery and the Mauritshuis have joined forces to celebrate his artistic achievement. For the Mauritshuis there is another incentive: the year 2019 marks 350 years since Rembrandt’s death, which is being commemorated throughout the Netherlands – all the more reason to shed new light on one of the master’s greatest pupils. In 1838 the German art connoisseur Gustav Waagen (1794–1868) described one of Nicolaes Maes’s paintings in the famous Bridgewater Collection in London, Young Girl Threading a Needle (cat. 15), and observed that ‘more attention has lately been paid to the merit of pictures of this kind, by this scholar of Rembrandt, so that they are now much esteemed in England. They generally represent quiet domestic scenes, and are distinguished by great clearness and warmth of the light and shade, which is always very effective’. This exhibition demonstrates the accuracy of Waagen’s assessment of the artist’s qualities. It also shows that he had identified a trend among collectors of his day: eight of the sort of ‘quiet domestic scenes’ he refers to and included in this exhibition had found their way to the British Isles by the early nineteenth century. Indeed, at the time little effort was made in the Netherlands to keep the artist’s masterpieces in the country. Three portraits by Maes ended up in the collection of the Mauritshuis more or
less by chance. In 1994, the Mauritshuis acquired one of the last available genre scenes, The Old Lacemaker (cat. 12), thereby filling a significant gap in its collection. Nicolaes Maes left us a rich and varied oeuvre. Following Rembrandt, Maes started his career as a painter of biblical subjects. He might have painted the monumental Christ Blessing the Children from the collection of the National Gallery in London in Rembrandt’s studio (cat. 1). Rembrandt’s influence is still apparent in this early work, evidenced by powerful brushstrokes, warm colours and strong chiaroscuro effects. After his apprenticeship in Amsterdam, Maes returned to his home town, Dordrecht. There he mainly painted genre pictures: domestic scenes derived from everyday life. In the short period between 1654 and 1658 he was one of the most innovative painters in that field. His experiments with the representation of interior spaces, his eye for lifelike details and the special intimacy of his genre scenes exerted great influence on painters such as Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer. A special category are the eavesdroppers, phenomenal compositions that make a direct appeal to the viewer. With finger on lips, the main character encourages us to spy on a scene played out in the background. A remarkable change took place in Maes’s career shortly before 1660, when he started to focus exclusively on portraiture. Initially he painted traditional portraits, but gradually he developed an elegant portrait style inspired by the works of Anthony van Dyck that clearly appealed to his clients. His sitters were not only from Maes’s native or adopted cities – the artist moved from Dordrecht to Amsterdam in 1673 – but from all corners of the Republic.
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This first Maes retrospective highlights all aspects of his multifaceted oeuvre. The exhibition opens with a small but impressive selection of biblical scenes. It also includes a broad selection of attractive genre scenes, which form the heart of the show. The Eavesdropper from the Wellington Collection at Apsley House, London, is one of the highlights (cat. 17). Finally, there is a selection of Maes’s best portraits. A group of four extremely elegant portraits showing members of the Leiden Van Alphen family, which are normally dispersed across various collections, have been temporarily reunited for this occasion (cats. 30–33). They, like the two pendant portraits from the Metropolitan Museum in New York (cats. 28–29), survive in their original frames. In London, the exhibition also includes a choice selection of Maes’s drawings. Curated by Ariane van Suchtelen at the Mauritshuis, and Bart Cornelis at the National Gallery, this exhibition is the result of a fruitful collaboration between our museums. At the National Gallery, Nina Cahill assisted in the preparations for the exhibition. The catalogue was produced by the Mauritshuis, with Ariane van Suchtelen as lead author and editor. Lynne Richards translated the Dutch texts into English. Gert Jan Slagter provided the attractive design while Waanders at Zwolle was the publisher. We are very grateful to all of them for their outstanding work on the exhibition and this publication.
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We are deeply grateful to our lenders: museums in the Netherlands, the UK and elsewhere, as well as private collectors who have been willing to part with their precious works of art for the duration of the show. Without their generosity, this exhibition could not have taken place. At the Mauritshuis the exhibition is very generously supported by the Friends of the Mauritshuis Foundation, NationaleNederlanden, part of NN Group, the Dutch Masters Foundation and the Prince
Bernhard Culture Fund. At the National Gallery the exhibition would not have been possible without the extremely generous support of The Thompson Family Charitable Trust and the continuing support of the Bernard Sunley Foundation. We are also grateful to the following individuals for their assistance in making the exhibition happen: Patricia Allerston, Christopher Baker, Liesbeth De Belie, Christine Bernheiden, Fred Bruijn, An Van Camp, Hugo Chapman, Jacquelyn Coutré, Stephanie Dickey, Frits Duparc, Adam Eaker, Rudi Ekkart, Wayne Franits, Paula van Gestel-van het Schip, Willem Jan Hoogsteder, Justyna Kedziora, Gerbrand Korevaar, León Krempel, Michel van de Laar, Justus Lange, Martine Lambrechtsen, Bieke van der Mark, Sarah McCain, Norbert Middelkoop, Eijk and Rose-Marie de Mol van Otterloo, Josephine Oxley, Bianca du Mortier, Cynthia Moyer, Marie Mundigler, Liesbeth van Noortwijk, Carlo van Oosterhout, Sander Paarlberg, Jet Pijzel, Monique Rakhorst, Lynn Roberts, Bill Robinson, Pieter Roelofs, Charles Roelofsz, Manja Rottink, Marijn Schapelhouman, Günter Schilder, Peter Schoon, Elizabeth Scott, Christian Tico Seifert, Desmond ShaweTaylor, Nicola Smith, John Stainton, Emilie den Tonkelaar, Adriaan Waiboer, David de Witt, Nienke Woltman and Anne Woollett.
Emilie Gordenker Director, Mauritshuis Gabriele Finaldi Director, The National Gallery
Lenders
Amsterdam Museum, Amsterdam (cat. 34) Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (cats. 6, 7, 30, pp. 183-197, figs. 3, 7, 8, 10, 17-19) Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (cat. 10) Galerie Neuse, Bremen (cats. 31, 32) Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels (cat. 13) Dordrechts Museum, Dordrecht (cats. 19, 21, 23, 35) Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague (cats. 12, 22) Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Kassel (cat. 4) Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University, Kingston (cat. 3) British Museum, London (pp. 184-185, figs. 2, 4) Guildhall Art Gallery (Samuel Collection), Mansion House, London (cats. 8, 18, 20) The National Gallery, London (cats. 1, 9, 26) The Royal Collection / HM Queen Elizabeth II, London (cat. 16) Victoria & Albert Museum, London (p. 192, fig. 12) Wellington Collection, Apsley House (English Heritage), London (cat. 17) J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (cat. 5) Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford (p. 184, fig. 1) Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (pp. 193-195, figs. 13-16) St Louis Art Museum, St Louis (cat. 11) Thalia Limited (cat. 27) Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid (cat. 14) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (cats. 2, 28, 29) and private collections (cats. 15, 24, 25, 33)
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Ariane van Suchtelen
Nicolaes Maes – Innovation and Versatility 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 must have spent four or five years in Rembrandt’s workshop, returning to Dordrecht in 1653 as a fullyfledged artist. He married, started a family and continued to work in his birthplace for twenty years. At some point in 1673 he moved to Amsterdam with his wife and children, a move that might well have been prompted by the difficult economic conditions in the Republic after the Rampjaar (the ‘disaster year’) of 1672. Maes did not sever his ties with Dordrecht and never took the step of becoming a citizen of Amsterdam, although he continued to live in the city until his death in 1693.1 Maes left us a full and varied body of works, consisting of biblical stories, genre scenes (based on everyday life) and portraits in all shapes and sizes. The number of paintings he created in three categories is far from even. There are fewer than ten history works, several dozen genre scenes and more than seven hundred portraits.2 Maes started out as a history painter, following in Rembrandt’s footsteps, but he soon switched the focus of his activities to genre painting. In a
short period between 1654 and 1658 he was one of the most innovative painters in this field in Dutch art history. His experiments with rendering interiors, his eye for trueto-life details and the particular intimacy of his domestic scenes had a major influence on painters like Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer.3 Maes painted his first portraits in 1655, and portrait commissions must have increasingly taken up his time. Shortly before 1660 he stopped making genre works and other paintings altogether and concentrated solely on portraiture, eventually developing an elegant style that appealed to a broad circle of clients in Dordrecht, Amsterdam and beyond.4 As well as paintings, many of Maes’s drawings have survived – an oeuvre that probably consists of more than two hundred sheets in a wide range of techniques.5 A significant proportion of these drawings were made as preliminary studies for his history paintings and genre scenes. There is a complete absence of drawings after Maes switched to portraiture. From Bible to Portrait The early biblical scenes with which Maes began his career follow Rembrandt’s example very closely – he may even have painted his Christ Blessing the Children
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(cat. 1) in his workshop.6 This large painting in the collection of the National Gallery in London is an ambitious work that demonstrates the young artist had learned much from his teacher, but was also developing his own style. The figures – particularly the children – are touchingly lifelike. Maes’s earliest signed and dated work is Abraham Dismissing Hagar and Ishmael of 1653 (cat. 2). Rembrandt’s influence is unmistakable in this Old Testament scene, not just in the sophisticated lighting effects and the powerful composition, but also in the subtle rendition of the protagonists’ emotional states. Maes was probably still in Amsterdam when he painted this work. By the end of 1653 he was back in Dordrecht, where he occasionally painted a biblical scene until 1658. In his early years as an independent artist, Maes focused on scenes of everyday life. In the nineteenth century such works
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1 Nicolaes Maes, Girl Threading a Needle, 1657. Panel, 40.6 x 31.8 cm. Private collection (cat. 15)
came to be known as genre paintings. Over time, many have admired Maes’s original and often witty genre scenes, thanks in part to the wealth of faithful details. Women almost always play the leading role in these intimate works: young and old, sometimes with children, occupied with various household chores or asleep on the job. These scenes, depicting the closely observed actions of the main figures, have a tranquil, almost monumental character, despite their often modest size. The painting of an elegantly dressed girl concentrating on threading her needle is highly original (fig. 1). No artist had ever pictured this subject before, even if it is an everyday occurrence, and no artist copied Maes either. Equally unusual are the group of eavesdroppers, compositions that appeal directly to the viewer. With her finger to her lips, the protagonist commands our silence as we spy with her on what goes on elsewhere in the scene (fig. 2-6).
Thanks to a quick method of painting, Maes’s output of portraits was extraordinarily large, with a peak period around 1675 when he must have delivered an average of one or two portraits a week. Maes undertook his first portrait commissions in 1655, making increasing numbers of portraits until 1660, responding no doubt to the demand from his clients. At first, Maes painted quite traditional busts of men and women dressed in black against a dark background (fig. 7). After 1660 his portraits gradually became lighter, the clothes more colourful and fantastical and the sitters more animated and idealised. The dark backgrounds made way for landscaped parks with waterfalls, classical columns and fountains; children acquired pets as playmates (fig. 8). In his ever more elegant portraits, Maes reflected the changing tastes and fashions in the late seventeenth century, and at
2-6 Nicolaes Maes, The Eavesdropper (details of p. 56, fig. 1, and cats. 16-19)
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7 Nicolaes Maes, Portrait of Jacob de Witt, 1657. Panel, 74.5 x 60.5 cm. Dordrechts Museum, Dordrecht
the same time his astonishing output of good portraits in this period had an impact on the general trend towards a greater refinement in portraiture. The graceful portraiture that had become Maes’s stock in trade chimed with a decorative pictorial language associated with international court art in the late seventeenth century, when artists began to abandon the typical ‘realism’ of the Golden Age in favour of a decorative style and a lighter palette.7 The sophisticated elegance appealed to the taste of an elite who had risen from the merchant class and become people of independent means with aristocratic pretentions. Maes and his fashionable portraits slotted seamlessly into this trend. Maes’s career spanned a period of forty years – roughly from 1653 to 1693 – during which time he undoubtedly underwent a greater development than many other artists. In the past, people often found it difficult to reconcile Maes’s early genre works, which were much admired, with his late portraits. His versatility has repeatedly led to misunderstanding and confusion, responses compounded by ignorance of the scope of his oeuvre. For a long time there was no clear idea about the earliest work. Authors found it hard to believe that one and the same artist could have worked in such completely different styles. Maes’s first biographer, Arnold Houbraken (1660-1719), described him solely as a successful portrait painter, with not a word about the early oeuvre of biblical scenes and genre works. ‘A Skilled and Flattering Brush’ Houbraken’s biography is our earliest source of information about Maes’s life. It was published in 1719 in the second volume of his collected artists’ biographies, The Great Theatre of Dutch Painters (De Groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen).8 Houbraken’s admiration of Maes’s ‘skilled and flattering brush’ reflects the great reputation as a portraitist the painter still enjoyed around 1700. Born in Dordrecht in
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8 Nicolaes Maes, Four Children in a Landscape, 1674. Canvas, 103.5 x 124.5 cm. Dordrechts Museum, Dordrecht
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Ariane van Suchtelen
A Career as a Portraitist Nicolaes Maes had all the talents he needed for a successful career as a portrait painter. As his biographer Arnold Houbraken wrote, he had a ‘skilled and flattering brush’ with which he could capture a good likeness in a smooth manner, and if required, he was also prepared to ‘improve’ his sitter’s looks somewhat. His great versatility meant that he was exceptionally good at painting clothes, backgrounds and other details. He must have had an unerring sense of the prevailing taste and fashion, to which he effortlessly responded by working in an ever more elegant style – at the same time his portraits influenced the general trend in late seventeenth-century portraiture towards a greater refinement and elegance. Maes undertook portrait commissions from the outset of his career in Dordrecht, but initially portraiture seems to have been no more than a sideline that kept the wolf from the door. After Jacob Cuyp’s death in 1652, there was a demand for a good portrait painter in Dordrecht that the young painter, just back from Amsterdam, could satisfy. Several eminent Dordrecht citizens were the first to have him immortalise them, and in their wake portrait commissions began to flood in. In his early years back in Dordrecht, Maes mainly depicted scenes from everyday life,
but at the end of the 1650s he changed course for good and exclusively painted portraits. The portraits that Maes painted in the 1650s are quite unadventurous: well executed half-length likenesses of men and women in sober black clothes with white collars against a plain background (figs. 1 and 2).1 In the early 1660s he began to move in a more fashionable direction, although he continued to supply his more conservative clients with accomplished, traditional portraits (cats. 22-23, 26). Maes initially only experimented with new style elements in his depictions of children and teenagers, but in the space of around ten years his portraits underwent a radical shift. In 1670 he began placing his sitters in an idealised setting. Landscaped parks, gushing waterfalls and splashing fountains, antique columns with draperies – these are elements that conjure up associations with an aristocratic lifestyle, like the hunting attributes in several portraits of boys (cat. 25).2 Poses become more graceful, heads turn to suggest movement. Young men stand with a hand on an out-thrust hip, regarded at the time as a very masculine stance (cats. 30-31, fig. 3),3 women delicately clasp a wisp of fluttering drapery to their breast (cat. 32). While hairstyles and wigs follow the
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1 Nicolaes Maes, Portrait of a Man, 1656. Panel, 74.6 x 60.3 cm. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
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latest fashion, the clothes become more fantastical; gleaming satins in every colour give the sitters a timeless allure. With his elegant portraits, Maes was following an international aristocratic portrait style, with opulent pseudoclassical fancy dress, which was developed by Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) at the English court and rapidly spread from there.4 Houbraken suggested that the change of style in Maes’s portraits might be connected to a visit to Antwerp, where he went to admire the work of the great Flemish masters.5 It is more likely, though, that Maes was influenced by
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2 Nicolaes Maes, Portrait of a Woman, 1656. Panel, 74.6 x 60.3 cm. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
examples closer to home. Around 1650 in The Hague, where the court resided, Adriaen Hanneman (c.1604-1671) and Jan Mijtens (c.1614-1670) pioneered this elegant portrait style inspired by Van Dyck, in which unmistakable influences of the increasingly dominant French culture and fashion began to make themselves felt.6 Maes’s elegant portraits struck a chord and his circle of clients steadily expanded. In search of new clients, in the course of 1673 Maes moved back to Amsterdam, where he swiftly prospered. He probably profited from the recent departure of
some leading Amsterdam portraitists – Bartholomeus van der Helst (b. 1613) had died in 1670 and Ferdinand Bol (1616-1680) had stopped painting at around the same time. Commissions flooded in, and Maes increased his output in order to serve all his clients. At the height of his career in the late 1670s he was supplying dozens of portraits a year. Most of his output consisted of pendant pairs of husbands and wives or sometimes engaged couples (cats. 28-29). He also painted family portraits (cat. 27), individual children’s portraits (cats. 24-25)
and group portraits of children. There was also a striking and original category of posthumous children’s portraits, in which Maes pictured a deceased child as the mythological king’s son Ganymede, riding an eagle to heaven (fig. 4).7 Despite his extraordinary productivity, his efficient virtuoso painting technique meant Maes was long able to maintain a high standard. It was not until his late years that the quality began to deteriorate and he reached a plateau, when his likenesses became rather repetitive.
3 Nicolaes Maes, Portrait of Simon van Alphen, c.1677. Canvas, 71.5 x 57.2 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (cat. 30)
4 Nicolaes Maes, Portrait of George de Vicq as Ganymede, 1681. Canvas, 97 x 82 cm. Fogg Art Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge (Mass.)
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5 Nicolaes Maes, Portrait of Jacob Trip, 1657. Canvas, 74.3 x 59 cm. The Burrell Collection, Glasgow Museums, Glasgow
6 Nicolaes Maes, Portrait of Job Jansse Cuyter and His Family, 1659. Canvas, 110.5 x 151.5 cm. North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh
An Extensive Clientele
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Throughout his career as a portraitist, Maes had clients in the most distinguished circles, and sometimes he even portrayed more than one generation of a family.8 Among the first portraits he painted as a newly established artist in Dordrecht were likenesses of highly placed people such as burgomaster Jacob de Witt (p. 14, fig. 7) and Jacob Trip (fig. 5),9 progenitor of one of the most important merchant families in the Republic (cats. 22-23). He also painted portraits of members of the Van Beveren, De Roovere, Van de Graaf and Stoop families of Dordrecht. These were prestigious commissions that got his career as a portraitist off to a flying start. At the end of the 1650s he must have painted two chimney-pieces for
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the grandest house in Dordrecht, the recently built Doelesteyn House; they were probably portraits of the sons of the owner, Cornelis Vaens.10 A 1670 inventory of Develstein Castle in Zwijndrecht, the country house of the aristocratic Van Beveren family, lists five life-size portraits by Maes.11 None of these paintings, for Doelesteyn or for Develstein, can be traced. A painting mentioned in the early sources that does still exist is the 1659 portrait of Job Jansse Cuyter and his family, which is now in Raleigh, North Carolina (fig. 6).12 Maes painted this work as part payment in kind for the house in Steegoversloot that he had purchased from Cuyter. The contract of sale dated 29 March 1658 stipulated that Maes would paint the vendor and his family in a single
7 Nicolaes Maes, Portrait of Justus Kriex, 1666. Canvas, 109 x 92 cm. Szépmüvészeti Múzeum, Budapest
work. The result is a charming, if rather stiff group portrait of the large family on the quayside in Dordrecht; children who had died are pictured as cherubs in the clouds upper right. Maes captured the moment when ship’s captain Cuyter said farewell to his wife and children before boarding a sloop that would carry him to a three-master lying at anchor. Perhaps the client had made too many demands and this is why it is a somewhat clumsy portrait, which is reminiscent of the work of Maes’s predecessor Jacob Cuyp, particularly in the squat figures. Comparison with the family portrait painted some fifteen years later shows just how far Maes developed as a portraitist in that period (cat. 27). Until he moved to Amsterdam in 1673 most of Maes’s clients came from
a career as a portraitist
Dordrecht, but occasionally he received a commission from elsewhere. As far as we know, Maes’s first client who did not come from the town was the Delft burgomaster Adriaan van der Goes, whose portrait he painted in 1658.13 In the 1660s he also acquired clients in Utrecht, including members of the related banking families Del Corne, De Milan and Kriex (fig. 7).14 In 1672 he painted a pair of fashionable pendant portraits of the Rotterdam infantry captain Maerten Nieuport and his Dordrecht-born wife Maria Colve with their little daughter (figs. 8 and 9).15 These superb likenesses are early high points in Maes’s elegant portrait style. Contemporary elements in the dress, like the abundant lace, are combined with fantasy, such as Nieuport’s pseudo-Roman military costume. In the difficult conditions in 1672 – which has gone down in Dutch history as the Disaster Year – this was undoubtedly an important commission for Maes. However, the poor state of the economy in Dordrecht as a result of the war meant the demand for portraits fell. As soon as his duties as a lieutenant in the Dordrecht civic guard permitted, Maes left for Amsterdam.16 The patronage of the DordrechtAmsterdam Trip family probably smoothed Maes’s path when he moved to Amsterdam. Maes had already painted a series of portraits of Jacob Trip and his wife in the 1660s, at the request of their sons Louis and Hendrik Trip, who lived in Amsterdam (cats. 22-23).17 These paintings hung in the most elegant mansion in the city, the recently built Trip House on Kloveniersburgwal, where the local elite had been able to see Maes’s portraiture. For whatever reason, possibly through the Trips, Maes had immediate access to the Amsterdam patrician class; he does not ever appear to have been without work. In order to satisfy this strong demand, he changed his range and started producing mainly smaller portraits that were quicker to paint – often busts in painted ovals like the portraits of Jacob Binckes and his betrothed (cats. 28-29). Maes made many
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8 Nicolaes Maes, Portrait of Maerten Nieuport, c.1672. Canvas, 137.5 x 111 cm. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
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9 Nicolaes Maes, Portrait of Maria Colve and Her Daughter Anna Maria Nieuport, 1672. Canvas, 136 x 110 cm. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
dozens of portraits of this type, his clients including the leading Amsterdam Hooft and Six families. In Amsterdam Maes’s circle of clients became more diverse and more geographically dispersed, although a number of Dordrecht families still sought him out. For example he had several principals in Leiden, including the Van Alphen family (cats. 30-33). There are too many names of the identified sitters to list here, and there are also countless surviving portraits of unidentified people. In all there are hundreds of paintings,
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a significant number of which are still in private hands. Maes painted people of various backgrounds: theologians and clergymen, professors, directors of the Dutch East India Company (cat. 26) and naval officers like Binckes, admiral Cornelis Tromp and the Zeeland lieutenant-admiral Cornelis Evertsen (fig. 10).18 In de late 1670s and in the 1680s Maes had such a dominant position in the Amsterdam portrait market that only a few could compete with him. Maes did, however, relinquish official portrait commissions for the boards of guilds and
10 Nicolaes Maes, Portrait of Cornelis Evertsen, Lieutenant-Admiral of Zeeland, 1680. Canvas, 148 x 124 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
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charitable institutions to artists such as Adriaen Backer (c.1636-1684).19 The large group portrait of the syndics (directors) of the Amsterdam surgeons’ guild painted around 1680 is his only painting in this category (cat. 34). An Efficient Painting Technique In the decade after his move to Amsterdam, Maes’s output was unprecedented. A count of all his works reveals that 1675 was a peak year with more than thirty known dated portraits.20 Since there are also many undated
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11 Nicolaes Maes, Portrait of Cornelis ten Hove, c.1682. Canvas, 58.2 x 46.2 cm. Mauritshuis, The Hague (M.J. Singendonck Bequest, 1907)
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paintings and not all of his work has survived (or is known), his output that year was probably significantly higher. As Houbraken wrote, Maes had so much work after he moved ‘that it was regarded as a favour if one was given precedence over others in being allowed to sit for a portrait’.21 The fact that he was given so many commissions probably also had to do with the competitive prices he appears to have charged for his portraits in Amsterdam. Rare sources suggest that his portraits were not expensive – probably the small ones in particular.22 He must have maintained a high level of
12 Nicolaes Maes, Portrait of Catharina Dierquens, c.1682. Canvas, 57.4 x 45.5 cm. Mauritshuis, The Hague (M.J. Singendonck Bequest, 1907)
13 Nicolaes Maes, Portrait of a man. Canvas, 69.2 x 57.2 cm. Whereabouts unknown
14 Nicolaes Maes, Portrait of a man. Canvas, 61.5 x 48.3 cm. Whereabouts unknown
productivity to make enough income. To achieve this, Maes began to standardise his repertoire. His clients could choose from a number of options in terms of the format and the scale, the gestures, poses, costumes and draperies, backgrounds and other details. For the costumes he offered a fairly limited number of regular colour combinations, including light blue with orange, lilac with orange (cat. 32) or dark red with buff (cat. 30). Sitters could select the elements they wanted in a portrait and place an order. The portraits of the Amsterdam couple Cornelis ten Hove and Catharina Dierquens dating from around 1682 are good examples of works made using this approach (figs. 11 and 12).23 They are depicted roughly three-quarter length, Cornelis standing and Catharina sitting, against a landscape background. One phenomenon that we find in many of Maes’s late portraits is that the heads are turned so far relative to the body that it
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15 Nicolaes Maes, Portrait of Pieter Groenendijk, c.1677. Canvas, 61.2 x 57.8 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
looks as if the couple are turning away from one another. Cornelis leans his right hand on a stone ledge, with his elbow turned outwards; with his left hand he holds a fold of his blue robe. Catharina leans on a rock with flowers and holds a shawl attached to her dress and a lock of her hair loosely between her fingers. Cornelis’s outward-turned right arm, the stone ledge, the extravagant lace that speaks of wealth – these are all elements that are repeated time after time in portraits of men of this period (figs. 1315).24 Catharina’s pose and gestures, and her attire are also almost identical to those in portraits of other sitters (figs. 16-18).25 The question is, to what extent was Maes assisted by pupils or assistants in his studio, who may have provided the less important parts of the composition, in his streamlined production line.26 Given the huge output and the use of various standard elements, it would make sense that the costumes, draperies or
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16 Nicolaes Maes, Portrait of a Woman. Canvas, 67.4 x 50.8 cm. Private collection (courtesy Hoogsteder Museum Foundation, The Hague)
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17 Nicolaes Maes, Portrait of a Woman. Canvas, 64.6 x 53.3 cm. Whereabouts unknown
backgrounds could have been executed by an assistant, so that Maes could concentrate on the faces. This does not seem to have been the case. His assured brushstroke can be found throughout his portraits of Ten Hove and Dierquens, especially in the characteristic abstract quality of the drapery. The same efficient technique shows up in other portraits. Maes modelled with broad, powerful brushstrokes and mixed the paint by working wet-in-wet frequently. In the faces, on the other hand, he used a sophisticated hatching technique, where the strokes of paint are placed side by side, not on top of one another.27 Technical analysis by Laurent Sozzani has revealed that Maes used an innovative method in some paintings in order to achieve deeply saturated colours for the clothes: when the painting was almost finished, he applied a final layer of glaze (very transparent paint)
nicolaes maes
18 Nicolaes Maes, Portrait of Lucia Emerentia van Ornia, c.1682. Canvas, 69 x 57 cm. Fries Museum, Leeuwarden
with a few swift strokes, without taking any account of the underlying modelling.28 He used this simple but effective means to achieve the rich effect he must have sought. Maes dated many of his paintings, so the chronology of his oeuvre can be reconstructed without much difficulty. Biographical information about some sitters also narrows down an estimated date. This is the case in the portraits of Cornelis ten Hove and Catharina Dierquens: the couple married in 1682, so it is highly likely that their portraits were painted in that year, or shortly thereafter. The lighting in Maes’s pendant portraits provides another clue for estimating dates – it changed when he moved from Dordrecht to Amsterdam. When he painted portraits of a married couple before 1673 in his Dordrecht years, Maes showed the light entering upper left in
the man’s portrait and upper right in the woman’s. The advantage of this was that both faces, turned towards one another in three-quarter profile, caught the light and the shape of the nose could be defined with a clear line of shadow. Maes used this double lighting in the 1672 portraits of Maerten Nieuport and his wife, which was in line with other Dordrecht portrait painters, such as Jacob Cuyp (1594-1652) and Jacobus Leveck (1634-1675),29 but it was unusual in Amsterdam. Maes had certainly not learned this from his teacher,
Rembrandt, who always used uniform lighting in pendant portraits (cf. figs. 22-23a/b). If two pendant portraits are regarded as a unit, then uniform lighting for both works is clearly more consistent. Maes adapted his uses of light after he moved to Amsterdam. This says a lot about Maes’s almost chameleon-like character as a portraitist. Throughout his career, which lasted almost forty years, he continually innovated and developed in line with his clients’ wishes and his own artistic insights.
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a career as a portraitist