NICOLAES MAES (Dordrecht 1634 – 1693 Amsterdam)
Nicolaes Maes (Dordrecht 1634 – 1693 Amsterdam)
Portrait of a Boy with Goldfinch and Spaniel at a Fountain
Oil on canvas, 75 x 60 cm (29.5 x 23.6 inch)
Signed ´MAES´ (lower left)
Provenance
~ W. Asch, London, c. 1915;
~ Duke of Marlborough, Blenheim Palace to 1963;
~ Freiherr von Treskow, 1963-1977;
~ With Richard Green, London, 1977;
~ since then private collection, Germany
Literature
Werner Sumowski (ed.), Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, vol. III, Landau 1983, p. 2032, no. 1419, p. 2145 (colour ill.)
***
Nicolaes Maes learned to draw from a local Dordrecht master and around the age of fifteen moved to Amsterdam, where he entered the studio of Rembrandt van Rijn, being taught by the great master for several years, probably between about 1648 and 1653.1 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. Maes moved from Dordrecht to Amsterdam in 1674 to attract a larger clientele, and remained there for the rest of his life.
About 1660 Maes began specialising 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.” In doing so, he became so successful with the elite of Amsterdam that, “so much work came his way that it was deemed a favor if one person was granted the opportunity to sit for his portrait before another, and so it remained for the rest of his life”, again in the words of Houbraken.2
The present portrait of a young boy, whose identity has sadly been lost over time, was painted circa 1675-1680, when Maes was settled in Amsterdam. The boy is dressed in a fantasy costume, loosely based on examples from Roman Antiquity. The bow and arrow at his feet and the goldfinch on a string on his finger identify him as a representation as Cupid, son of Venus. The fountain and shell refer to the popular play Granida and Daifilo by Pieter Cornelisz Hooft. It was customary for sitters during the Golden Age to be depicted as characters from Classical mythology, the Bible or even as shepherds and shepherdesses. Maes also depicted young boys as Ganymedes and the hunter Adonis. A comparable portrait by Maes of four children in mythological guises is preserved in the Dordrechts Museum, Dordrecht (fig.).3 Another comparable portrait of a boy with a bullfinch is in the Minneapolis Institute of Art (fig.).4
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. Arnold Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, vol. II, The Hague, 1719, p. 275.
3. Oil on canvas, 103.5 x 124.5 cm, signed and dated 1674, inv. no. DM/972/467; Werner Sumowski (ed.), Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, vol. III, Landau 1983, p. 2036, no. 1443, ill. on p. 2169.
4. Oil on panel, 42.4 x 29.7 cm, circa 1670, inv. no. 2017.50.
