Nicolaas Maes - 1632-1693

( Originally Published 1908 )

DUTCH SCHOOL

THE life of Nicolaas Maes or Maas (pronounced Mas) can be told in a few lines, for the facts known about him are very meagre. He was born in 1632 at Dordrecht, whence came also several other Dutch painters — Albert Cuyp, Ferdinand Bol, and Godfried Schalcken. The year 1632 was a significant one in the development of Dutch art, the year that Rembrandt painted the great picture of his youth, `The Anatomical Lecture.' Maes doubtless studied with some unknown painter before, at the age of eighteen, entering Rembrandt's studio, where he remained four years. M. Burger says that he learned drawing of some insignificant painter, but that he learned painting from Rembrandt.

Maes's best pictures were his earliest ones, delightful pictures of genre, painted while still in Rembrandt's studio, or at least in the years immediately succeeding, that is, between 1655 and 1660. Generally they were small pictures of interior scenes. Unlike Gerard Terborch and Gabriel Metsu, who depicted gallant scenes of the Dutch upper classes, and unlike Jan Steen and Adrian van Ostade, who painted scenes of rollicking tavern life, Nicolaas Maes chose simple scenes of humble peasant life. Frequently he gives us an old woman, busy about her daily vocations, either spinning, as in the two pictures now belonging to the Ryks Museum at Amsterdam (plate x), or preparing vegetables for dinner (plate iii), or asking a blessing before par-taking of her simple repast. The light generally falls from an unseen window on the left of the picture, in the masterly handling of which Maes shows him-self a veritable pupil of Rembrandt, though he was never over-influenced by the great master. There is one picture by Maes in the Louvre entitled, `The Blessing,' a marvelously beautiful picture of an old woman with her hands folded in prayer, as she sits before a table laid out with simple viands for the evening meal, while her cat plays with her slipper. This picture is signed, and dated 1648, but M. Lafenestre thinks the signature is forged and considers the date as doubtful. If genuine, Maes must have painted it when only sixteen years of age, which seems almost incredible, as it is painted in his very best manner and seems hardly the work of an immature lad.

At other times he painted less somber subjects, for example the two versions of the so-called `Indiscreet Servant,' one in the Six Collection at Amsterdam, the other in Buckingham Palace (plate II). `The Milkmaid' of the Van Loon Collection of Amsterdam is another charming work of these early years. Here the scene is laid outside an old Dutch house, and the subject is the very simple one of an older woman in white cap with gold ornaments giving some money to a young girl dressed in a straw hat and red petticoat, and holding a milk-pail. This picture Lord Ronald Gower called "a superb specimen of the most Rembrandt-like pupil of Rembrandt; the coloring of this, picture is splendid."

It is to be regretted that Maes ever left the master's influence, as he did about 166o, when he went to Antwerp to see the works of the great Flemings and to visit the painters still living. From this time he gave up the painting of simple genre subjects, in which he excelled, for the painting of portraits, for the reason, it is thought, that there was a better livelihood to be gained at that time in this branch of art. Rembrandt had rather lost favor with the public during his later life, and Van der Helst and Dirk Hals, brother to Franz Hals, were the popular portrait artists of the day in Holland. In Flanders the great masters were all passed away. Rubens had died in 164o, Van Dyke in 1641, and Snyders, at the age of seventy-eight, in 1657. Only Jordaens and Teniers the Younger were left, with the former of whom Maes made friends. Maes did not adopt the splendid Rembrandtesque manner of portrait-painting, but rather that of the degenerate Flemings, who had be-come vitiated by French taste. Most of his portraits are smoothly finished, commonplace, and uninteresting, and he seems to have abandoned his rich color and splendid chiaroscuro.

In Antwerp Maes remained more than eighteen years, and was most successful from a popular and financial point of view. In fact, it was as a portrait-painter that the artist was best known until within a hundred years, when interest was aroused again in his exquisite little pictures of genre. It has been said that the `Little Masters' of Holland were only successful when they kept to the painting of small canvases; that when they attempted large themes they lost themselves, they became weak and uninteresting; but that the pupils of Rembrandt alone, and among them Maes, were successful at both large and small pictures.

Some of the later portraits attributed to Maes are so inferior in conception and handling that it has been thought by some critics that they may, have been painted by another artist of the same name, possibly a son, as the name Maes or Maas is a common one in Holland. The manner of signature, too, on the early genre pictures and that on the later portraits is quite different in character. In the former the artist wrote his name, N. Maes, either in large Roman letters or with the M,A, and E, the first three letters of the surname, joined in a monogram. In the later pictures the initial N and the initial M of the surname were joined together with many flourishes.

On the other hand, M. Barger points to a portrait of a boy in the Museum of Rotterdam with the earlier form of signature, and painted in such a manner as to show plainly the transition from the pictures of genre to the later portraits dating from 1675 onward. In this picture is a life-sized, half-length figure of a boy dressed in a handsome costume of gray and white, with knots of gray and white ribbon at his girdle. He is offering cherries to a parrot perched on a balustrade. Behind him is a rich red curtain drawn back to show a sunset. M. Bürger says of this: "We have come to portraits composed, with balustrades, curtains, vistas of sunsets, with accessories and pretexts for decorative combinations. From the simplicity of Rembrandt we go to the elegant récherchés of Van Dyke, to the emphatic richness of the Flemings." The reds, though rich and beautiful in themselves and recalling the color so often used in the sleeves or jackets of his peasant women, are much too in-tense for the grays and whites; and, used in strong contrast without moderating half-tones, the shadows have lost their transparence and the clear tones their limpidity. "His future decadence," continues Bürger, "is already prophetic in this portrait, as well in color as in composition." Until we have some further information on the subject, let us consider, as does M. Bürger, that these portraits as well as genre pieces are by the same man, one only Nicolaas Maes.

Among the large canvases containing a number of portraits, members of a guild or trustees of a hospital, and of which Rembrandt and more especially Franz Hals painted so many, there is only one that is attributed to Maes; namely, a picture in the Six Collection at Amsterdam. Formerly it was in the Van der Hoop Collection, and attributed to Jacob Backer. It is now thought to represent the Corporation of Surgeons in Amsterdam, and M. Bredius has pointed out that any one conversant with the history of costume in Holland could see that it was painted too late to be by the hand of Backer, who died in 1651; and also the astute critic has discovered a similarity in the portrait heads to two portraits by Maes in the Brussels Museum, painted in his transitional manner, "when he has still all the power and brilliance of his color, and when he still professes also some respect for the truth of chiaroscuro."

Of the pictures painted from 1665 to 167o, there are few in existence to-day bearing his signature, but there are numerous portraits painted by him after 1675 to be found in many of the Dutch galleries. John Smith, in his `Catalogue Raisonné,' mentions forty-five pictures of genre, but does not catalogue his portraits. About two thirds of the former are in England, several fine ones in the National Gallery, but many more in private collections.

In 1678 Maes returned to Holland to pass the rest of his days, and settled in Amsterdam. Heer Houbraken says that he was quiet and courteous in manner, that he enjoyed society and entertaining, and was of a cheerful and happy disposition until the last year of his life, when he suffered much from the gout, of which trouble, like Gaspar Netscher, he died, in December, 1693, in his sixty-first year.

As Frederick Wedmore writes, Nicolaas Maes was "one of the strangest instances not of a talent that was promising, but of a genius that was great, an art consummate and accomplished, though limited, which became too soon perverted, and then was somewhat early buried out of sight — yet a genius and an art that left us after all, in our day, no irritating array of ambitious failures on which attention must be fixed. During ten splendid years, from 1650 to 1660 — or it may be a little later — there is a series of high work. What followed is really known less, and we can afford to ignore it."