NICOLAES MAES (Dordrecht 1634 – 1693 Amsterdam)
Nicolaes Maes (Dordrecht 1634 –1693 Amsterdam)
Portrait a Lady in a White Silk Dress with a Gold Scarf
Oil on canvas, 115.5 x 92.7 cm (45.5 x 36.5 inch)
Signed ‘Maes’ and dated ‘167[.]’ (middle right)
Provenance
~ The Earls of Lonsdale, Lowther Castle1
~ Sold by James Lowther, 7th Earl of Lonsdale (1922–2006) at Christie’s, London, 24 April 1970, lot 126 (‘Maes. Portrait of a lady, three-quarter length, wearing a white satin dress with a gold sash, and jewels in her hair’)
~ Anonymous sale, Christie’s, New York, 18 January 1981, lot 55, repr. pl. 41
~ With dealer Larry Steigrad, New York, and shown at TEFAF Maastricht, c.2015
Literature
L. Krempel, Studien zu den datierten Gemälden des Nicolaes Maes (1634–1693), Petersberg 2000, p. 306, cat. no. A 121, fig. 172 (black/white) and also identical with cat. no. B 39, p. 339
***
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.2 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.
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, which he absorbed during a visit to Antwerp, where he also visited Jacob Jordaens. Having established himself as an independent master in Dordrecht after his apprenticeship with Rembrandt, Maes moved back to Amsterdam in 1673 to attract a new clientele, and immediately became hugely successful, receiving one portrait commission after another, his patrons attracted by his elegant international court style.
Arnold Houbraken’s 1719 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.’3 Houbraken further added the great compliment that he knew of no other painter before or after Maes who was more accomplished in capturing the likenesses of his sitters.4
This magisterial portrait is executed in Maes’s most impressive format, nearly life-size, the sitter shown from the knees upwards, standing against a southern evening landscape, the dress of the sitter bathing in sunlight, while the classical column at the right adds further contrast and an exotic atmosphere. The last digit of the date is sadly no longer legible, but stylistically the 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 can for instance be compared to Maes’s Portrait of a Lady dated 1677 in the collection of the Timken Museum of Art, San Diego, California (fig.).5
The painting was formerly in the collection of the Earls of Lonsdale at Lowther Castle in Cumbria, England (fig.).
1. Confirmed by dealer Larry Steigrad, who noticed a Lowther Castle label on the reverse of the original frame of the painting.
2. For the artist, see León Krempel, Studien zu den datierten Gemälden des Nicolaes Maes (1634–1693), Petersberg 2000 and Ariane van Suchtelen et al., Nicolaes Maes, exh. cat. The Hague (Mauritshuis) and London (The National Gallery) 2019.
3. Arnold Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen (…), The Hague 1718-1721, vol. II (1719), pp. 273-74: ‘de Schilderkonst by Rembrant geleert, maar verliet vroeg die wyze van schilderen, te meer toen hy zig tot het schilderen van pourtretten begaf, en wel zag dat inzonderheit de jonge Juffrouwen meer behagen namen in het wit dan in ’t bruin’.
4. Houbraken, loc. cit.: ‘Hy had een vaardig en vleyend penceel ’t geen hem wonder wel diende in ’t schilderen van pourtretten, daar hy zig geheel toe begaf, en ’t geen hem ook zoodanig toegevallen is, dat ik niet weet dat ‘er een Schilder voor of na hem is geweest, die gelukkiger is geweest in ’t wel treffen der gelykenissen van der menschen weezens.’
5. Oil on canvas, 67.6 x 56.6 cm, Putnam Foundation, Timken Museum of Art, inv. no. 1986.002; Van Suchtelen et al. (op. cit.), p. 173, fig. 30-33b.
