Nicolaes Maes and Rembrandt

Ferdinand Mount wrote in March 2020 for TLS:

"... At times, Rembrandt and Maes do work exactly the same reflective magic. Compare, for example Rembrandt’s “Girl at a Window” in Dulwich with Maes’s picture of the same title here, both so quiet and so infinitely arresting.

Yet, for the most part, what Maes does not so much lack the capacity for as actively abjure is the theatricality that makes Rembrandt’s great biblical masterpieces: those poignant figures carrying out their destiny in a pool of light, dwarfed by the surrounding darkness – seen in abundance at the recent exhibition, Rembrandt’s Light, at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. If there is drama in Maes, it is what we now call “immersive theatre”. We are part of the action; there’s no proscenium arch; if there is a stage, it’s an apron stage. We are walking the same street, enjoying the same fresh air of Amsterdam or Dordrecht, dawdling at the same back door with the girl selling milk.

Compare Maes’s portraits of the armaments king Jacob Trip and his equally formidable wife, Margaretha de Geer, with Rembrandt’s portraits of the same couple on show upstairs with the National Gallery’s other Dutch pictures. The Rembrandts are marvellous representations of a fierce and undimmed old age. But they are distanced from the spectator – that is part of their emotional power – while in the Maes version, Jacob and Margaretha seem to be in the room with us, unsettling presences..."

“Girl at a Window”, and at bottom, portraits of Margaretha de Geer, wife of Jacob Trip