(Dordrecht 1634–1693 Amsterdam)
Portrait of a young noblewoman, three-quarter-length, with a sheep and deer, a landscape beyond,
signed lower left corner: MAES (strengthened),
oil on canvas, 61 x 50.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
with Frost & Reed, London;
sale, Sotheby’s, New York, 18 May 2006, lot 169 (as Nicolaes Maes);
with Soraya Cartategui, Madrid, 2012;
where acquired by the present owner

The present painting is registered in the RKD database under no. 0000279522 (as Nicolaes Maes).

Portraits of children and young boys are frequent in the production of Nicolaes Maes, often depicted outdoors in arcadian settings, sometimes as small hunters or mythological characters, as in Portrait of Three Children as Ceres, Ganymede and Diana in the Haggerty Museum of Art, dated1673. Animals frequently appear in this type of work, such as puppies, young deer and lambs, probably concealing allegorical meanings, linked to the theme of the education of the young and the idea of childhood purity.

Here, the young protagonist is represented as a woman – the dress, the pearl jewelry and the pose also reappear almost identically in the depiction of an adult woman such as the Portrait of Petronella Dunois in the Rijksmuseum – but the little lamb in her arms, the garland of flowers and the clear water of the waterfall in the background still allude to the purity of the maiden.

Originally from Dordrecht, Nicolaes Maes moved to Amsterdam around 1648 to train in Rembrandt’s atelier. His earliest known paintings are historical works or domestic interior scenes, strongly inspired by his master’s work, both in their compositions and in their use of light. See for example the Young Woman at a Cradle (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum), datable to 1653–1655, in which the painter re-adapts the Holy Family painted by Rembrandt in 1645, now in the Hermitage.

Returning to Dordrecht in 1653, Maes also started to paint portraits, apparently influenced by other artists active in the city such as Samuel von Hoogstraten, Jacob Gerritsz. Cuyp and Albert Cuyp, rather than Rembrandt. Cuyp and Albert Cuyp: here, the portraits are shown in a frontal manner, with rather rigid and limited gestures, and the canvases are characterised by a reduced colour pallette and very bare backgrounds.

From the 1660s onwards, the artist abandoned all other painting genres, devoting himself exclusively to portraiture for the last thirty years of his career. During this phase, Maes began to look to the sumptuous models of van Dyck, especially through the works of Jan Mytens, adopting a looser brushstroke and brighter colours. In 1673 he moved to Amsterdam, probably attracted by the commercial opportunities that had opened up after the death of the most important portrait painters active in that city, Abraham van den Tempel and Bartholomeus van der Helst. The move proved to be fortuitous and the artist immediately met with great success among the patrons of the local high society.