and individual language with which Rembrandt renders similar genre pieces.”
The truth of this criticism seems to be sufficient of itself to exclude Maes from the ranks of the great genre painters, whose works are great of their kind just because these painters so admirably fitted the size of their pictures to the scope of their intention and their powers, and wrought their canvases to the highest pitch of a personally inspired technical perfection. This became the ideal of Holland genre and remains its chief distinction; and Maes only attains to it in his smaller canvases, such as the two examples of An Old Woman Spinning, in the Rijks Museum, and An Old Woman Peeling Apples (the spinning-wheel near her), in the Berlin Gallery, and The Cradle and The Dutch Housewife of the National Gallery. The period of these small genre pictures, beginning about 1655 and lasting for ten years, represents the high-water mark of Maes’s artistic career.
In his earlier period he shows a preference for red, juxtaposed with black and less frequently with yellow, that continues to characterize his work. But at first, as in The Dreamer, it is the brightness of hue that seems to attract him. He has bathed the red shutter and the girl’s figure and the leaves and fruit of the apricot-tree, that grows beside the window from which she leans, in a warm sunlight, and the latter, blended with soft shadows, glows upon her face and hands. All the several textures are rendered with admirable veracity, and a resemblance to life, that would be startling but for the quiet, pensive expression of the girl’s figure that pervades the canvas. The picture attracts and charms, but does it hold one’s interest? Scarcely, if you come back to it after seeing the more imaginative treatment of chiaroscuro in the Card-Players of the National Gallery; and still less, if you compare it with one of Maes’s smaller genre pictures in the Rijks Museum; for example, An Old Woman Spinning (No. 1504). Here the red reappears in the table-cloth, and the black spot is made by her head against the drabbish white of the wall, but the yellow is disguised in her olive-green dress, which shows the whitish-gray sleeves of the undergarment. It is a cooler scheme of color, more restrained yet richer, and it is lighted without any striking contrasts of chiaroscuro. Instead, the humble apartment is permeated with a dimly luminous atmosphere, out of which certain parts of the composition emerge into clearness, while the rest is veiled in half-tones and shadow. The picture is extraordinarily real, exquisite in technique, and deeply moving in its suggestion of the half-lights of existence among the aged and the poor. The secret is, that what was experiment or assertion in the larger canvas has here become the free expression of the artist’s simple and sincere sentiment. Sentiment and expression are united in a natural and complete equipoise.
During the last twenty-five years of his life Maes seems to have gained a rather scanty subsistence by painting portraits. Some of these are of high merit; the Portrait of a Man, for example, in the Fine Arts Museum at Budapest, which represents a gray-haired and bearded man, with black velvet cap and black coat edged with brown fur, sitting in a red-backed chair. Thus it repeats the artist’s favorite color-scheme, and moreover,
OLD WOMAN IN MEDITATION GABRIEL METSU
RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM