Nicolaes Maes is billed, in this new National Gallery exhibition, as a Dutch master of the Golden Age, which pinpoints one reason why you might not have heard of him. When you consider the others in the field, Maes, alas, is overshadowed at one end of his career by his master, Rembrandt, and in genre scenes by Vermeer.
The earliest pictures show his debt to his teacher. The National initially paid his Christ Blessing the Children the compliment of misattributing it to Rembrandt — the child whom Christ caresses turns away from him towards the dramatic light shining onto them both. Even more like Rembrandt are two terrific spirited drawings of Absalom getting caught up in the branches of a tree by his long hair (there’s a lesson there), and then getting skewered as he dangles.
But it’s the genre pictures that Maes is best known for — pictures of appealing domestic intimacy, almost all of them depicting women at various tasks or eavesdropping on smaller scenes, a device that Velasquez used to marvellous effect in the Servant Girl at Emmaus. Maes’s young girl threading a needle is beautifully observed. As are the fine red chalk drawings of women. The eavesdropping scenes are amusing but they tremble just this side of whimsy, and occasionally fall right in. Still, they’re a chance for him to show off his still-life skills with artful displays of ceramics and drapery.
As to the lucrative portraits on which he squandered his gifts at the end of his life, the less said the better. The frankly ugly children and self-regarding nobles that make up the end of the exhibition seem to belong to a different artist. Even the best, of the elderly matriarch, Margaretha de Geer, is better done (again) by Rembrandt — as you can see elsewhere in the gallery.
Until May 31 (nationalgallery.org.uk)
