Nicolaes Maes

Nicolaes Maes was, by the second half of his career, one of the most prolific and fashionable Dutch portrait painters of his century. His œuvre was, however, one of immense variety. It ranged from early religious paintings dating to his apprenticeship in Rembrandt’s studio, to his celebrated genre scenes. Yet, by the close of the 1650s, he abandoned these subjects to focus wholly on portraiture.

Maes’ production of portraits underwent a radical stylistic upheaval. His early works can be broadly defined by the sobriety of his sitters’ dress and conservative colour palette paired with precise brushwork.

This picture, however, dates from the latter part of his career, by which time he eschewed his traditional early style for a more flamboyant one that looked to Flanders, and especially Van Dyck , for its visual cues. Maes was apparently given to ‘improving’ his sitters with a ‘skilled and flattering brush’.¹ There is much evidence for this in both the gentleman’s confident pose and luxuriant handling of the paint. The ruined column and subject’s classicizing cloak lend the portrait a general air of the antique, rather than the specific Dutch domesticity of Maes’ earlier works.

The sitter, identifiable as Jean Baptist Everard de Bourchgrave (1613–1684), was painted along with his wife Catharina de Woelmont, the subject of a pendant portrait.² 

¹ A. Houbracken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, Amsterdam 1718–1721, quoted in A. van Suchtelen, 'A Career as a Portraitist', in A. van Suchtelen, B. Cornelis, M. Schapelhouman and N. Cahill, Nicholas Maes, Zwolle 2019, p. 127.

² C. Hofstede de Groot 1916, p. 519, no. 147.