Entry by
William W. Robinson,
completed May 13, 2019:
Nicolaes Maes ranks among the most outstanding Dutch painters of domestic scenes and portraits. A native of Dordrecht, he studied with Rembrandt in Amsterdam in the late 1640s and early 1650s, returning to his hometown by the end of 1653. Until about 1660, he specialized in pictures of household life, portraits, and biblical subjects. After 1660, Maes devoted himself exclusively to portraiture. His varied oeuvre of drawings—more than one hundred survive—all date from this period in Dordrecht. In 1673, he moved to Amsterdam, where he attracted a larger and wealthier clientele than the patrons he served in Dordrecht.
The Eavesdropper belonged to an album that was made up and bound in the 18th century, when it was probably acquired by George Ramsay, 8th Earl of Dalhousie (1739–1787). In addition to some 30 sketches by Maes, this volume contained dozens of drawings by other Rembrandt pupils and followers. It remained in the Dalhousie family until 1922, when it was sold to the London dealer P. & D. Colnaghi, and shortly thereafter the contents were dispersed by the Paul Cassirer gallery, in Berlin.
First published and illustrated in Wilhelm Valentiner’s 1924 monograph on Maes, the drawing was recognized in 1984 by Werner Sumowski as a compositional sketch for the artist’s painting An Eavesdropper with a Woman Scolding, in the Harold Samuel Collection, Guildhall Art Gallery, Mansion House, in London (Fig. 1). The painting depicts a young servant woman who regards the viewer with her finger to her lips, engaging our silence and complicity in her eavesdropping. She listens to her mistress who, in an adjacent room, berates her husband, whom we cannot see. The picture is signed and dated 1655. It is one of six paintings by Maes, all of which date between 1655 and 1657, that depict women—and, in one case, a man—who eavesdrop on conversations or erotic encounters that take place in other parts of the house. Exceptionally, the work in the Samuel Collection includes a trompe-l’oeil curtain and frame. The curtain has been partially drawn aside to reveal the morally compromising domestic quarrel.
The small, summary sketch lays out the main elements of the composition—the figure of the servant, the barrel and assorted household objects to her left, and the illusionistic curtain that occupies much of the right half of the panel—although it does not show the scolding housewife who plays an essential part in the narrative and meaning of the picture. In other instances, too, Maes relied on only a quick sketch to establish the overall design of a painting, leaving the details to be worked out on the canvas or panel or in figure studies on paper. A small, three-quarter length figure of a woman with her index finger raised to her lips likely served as a detail study for the servant in the Samuel Collection painting (Fig. 2). Like the Harvard sketch, this drawing also came from the Dalhousie album and was executed in brown ink applied with a brush.
