17th Century Old Master Painting By Nicolaes Maes (1634–1693) Portrait Of A Lady

Nicolaes Maes (Dordrecht 1634 –1693 Amsterdam)

Portrait of a Lady by a Dolphin Fountain

Oil on canvas, 44 x 33.5 cm (17.3 x 13.2 inch); contained in an elaborate giltwood frame of Rococo model, probably France circa 1900

Indistinctly signed ‘Maes’ (lower right)

Provenance
Private collection, France

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Before studying painting with Rembrandt van Rijn in Amsterdam, probably between about 1648 and 1653, Nicolaes Maes learned to draw from a local Dordrecht master.1 Subsequently, he returned home to embark on an independent career. By the 1650s he had developed a reputation for painting the intimate life of women and children; his finest pictures capture aspects of Rembrandt's tenderness and intimacy. Maes's scenes often include vignettes such as a cat stealing the dinner of an old woman as she prays. By representing an interior as a suite of rooms rather than a three-wall, one-room enclosure, Maes had great impact on the Delft painters Johannes Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch.

About 1660 Maes began specializing in portraits, becoming wildly successful by abandoning his Rembrandtesque style for the bright colours and studied elegance of Flemish artists such as Anthony van Dyck. 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.’

Stylistically, this painting would appear to date from the period around 1675, when many sitters of a younger generation were providing commissions to Maes. These younger generations tended to wear more colourful clothes, as from the middle of the seventeenth century the colour palette of clothing became more varied, influenced by Flanders. Although the identity of the beautiful sitter has been lost over time, she is likely to have belonged to Amsterdam’s ‘happy few’, and the artist has captured her personality with great sensitivity. Similar portraits by Maes can be found in many of the world’s leading museums, including the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Mauritshuis in The Hague and the National Gallery, London. Our painting is particularly close to Maes’s portrait of Ingena Rotterdam (d. 1704), preserved in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum, New York (fig.).2

1. For the artist, see León Krempel, Studien zu den datierten Gemälden des Nicolaes Maes (1634–1693), Petersberg 2000 and Ariane van Suchtelen a.o., Nicolaes Maes, exh. cat. Mauritshuis, The Hague 2019.
2. Oil on canvas, 43.8 x 33 cm, signed and dated 1676, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, inv. no. 11.149.3 (gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1911); Walter Liedtke, Dutch Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2007, vol. 1, pp. 446–49, no. 114, colour pl. 114.