Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Nicolaes Maes
Dutch; 17th-century
The Hague, The Netherlands: Mauritshuis
75%
The Old Lacemaker. c1655. Oil on canvas
At its worst Maes's work represents the first wave of Dutch painting's 18th-century lapse into repetition and mannerism: he was Amsterdam's most popular painter in the last few decades of the 17th century, the twilight of the Golden Age. But at its best, as here, Maes can exhibit all the symphonic complexities of emptiness, all the particularism and muscularity to the pictorial building-up of objects, all the poetry within the observational tendency that, together, distinguish classic Dutch art. But there's something else here, too — a sumptuousness derived from a proclivity for paint as paint, which is at odds with his genre's typical realism. The nested cubic voids in this picture don't rival those of de Hooch, and the woman doesn't cut the same severe and ontic figure as she would in a ter Borch, but the amount of body and life in every plate and pleat, and the brash distinction between light and dark, takes Maes's painting somewhere else. It's curious to see the Dutch commitment to objects and their surfaces collide with this exploration of the literal substance of paint. It's more an interesting hint at future degeneration than it is an achievement, but regardless it's worth looking at. (TFS, 2026)