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DEATH:
1693 MAES
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BIRTH:
1864 TOULOUSE~LAUTREC
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| ^ Born
on 24 November 1864: Henri~Marie~Raymond de Toulouse~Lautrec~Monfa,
in Albi, France, painter who died on 09 September 1901. — He was an aristocrat, the son and heir of Comte Alphonse~Charles de Toulouse and last in line of a family that traced its ancestry back a thousand years. Henri's father was rich, handsome, and eccentric. His mother was overly devoted to her only living child. Henri was weak and often sick. By the time he was 10 he had begun to draw and paint. At 12 young Toulouse-Lautrec broke his left leg and at 14 his right leg. The bones failed to heal properly, and his legs stopped growing. He reached young adulthood with a body trunk of normal size but with abnormally short legs. He was only 1.5 meter tall. Deprived of the kind of life that a normal body would have permitted, Toulouse-Lautrec lived wholly for his art. He stayed in the Montmartre section of Paris, the center of the cabaret entertainment and bohemian life that he loved to paint. Circuses, dance halls and nightclubs, racetracks — all these spectacles were set down on canvas or made into lithographs. Toulouse~Lautrec was very much a part of all this activity. He would sit at a crowded nightclub table, laughing and drinking, and at the same time he would make swift sketches. The next morning in his studio he would expand the sketches into bright~colored paintings. In order to become a part of the Montmartre life — as well as to protect himself against the crowd's ridicule of his appearance — Toulouse~Lautrec began to drink heavily. In the 1890s the drinking started to affect his health. He was confined to a sanatorium and to his mother's care at home, but he could not stay away from alcohol. Toulouse~Lautrec died at the family château of Malromé. Since then his paintings and posters — particularly the 'Moulin Rouge' group — have been in great demand and bring high prices at auctions and art sales. — LINKS — La Goulue — Confetti — Divan Japonais — Alone — The Kiss — Justine Dieuhl (1891) — A Montrouge (1886) — Quadrille Moulin-Rouge (1892) — A la mie — Yvette Guilbert — Women Dancing — Women of the Night Waiting — 66 Prints at Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco — |
| ^ Died
on 24 November 1693: Nicolaas Maes (or Maas),
Dutch painter specialized in portraits, born in 1634. — Nicolaes Maes was born in Dordrecht. He worked in Rembrandt’s Amsterdam workshop after he had had professional training with an unknown painter in Dordrecht. His earliest works are religious scenes with something of Rembrandt’s spiritual emotion. But this was not the type of painting most natural to Maes and his own temperament led him to look for his own way in painting. After a short stay in Delft, Maes returned to his native town in 1653. Based on the knowledge of Rembrandt’s and Delft’s schools, Maes started to specialize in depiction of interiors. Very soon he chose his subjects and found his own palette. Genre scenes: in the kitchen, the nursery, the backyard fascinated him. During his stay in Dordrecht (1654-1659) he painted his best genre pictures. A typical painting of the period is Naughty Little Drum-Player: in the mirror on the wall the artist himself is reflected. Some art historians consider that this painting is a group portrait of the artist’s family. The young mother then is Adriana Brouwers, widow of the priest Arnoldus de Gelder. Maes married her in 1654. The little drum-player, Ustus, son of Adriana and Arnoldus, nearly woke up his little sister Ioganna, daughter of the artist. After 1659, Maes worked on portraits more and more. In 1673, he moved to Amsterdam, where he died. Maes was a very prolific and successful painter, and he is a bright representative of Holland’s Baroque. — In about 1648 Maes became a pupil of Rembrandt in Amsterdam, staying there until 1654 when he returned to his native town Dordrecht. In his early years he concentrated on genre pictures, rather sentimental in approach, but distinguished by deep glowing colours he had learnt from his master. Old women sleeping, praying, or reading the Bible were subjects he particularly favoured. In the 1660s, however, Maes began to turn more to portraiture, and after a visit to Antwerp around the middle of the decade his style changed dramatically. He abandoned the reddish tone of his earlier manner for a wider, lighter and cooler range (greys and blacks in the shadows instead of brownish tones), and the fashionable portraits he now specialized in were closer to van Dyck than to Rembrandt. In 1673 he moved permanently to Amsterdam and had great success with this kind of picture. — LINKS — Old Woman at Prayer (Prayer without End) (1656) — Simon van Alphen (1680) — Christ before Pilate (1650, 216x174cm) _ The painting was attributed to Rembrandt until 1880. It is assumed that the boy at the left is the self-portrait of the young artist. The head of Pilate and that of the man with red beret are also porttraits. — Portrait of Four Children (1657, 150x112cm) _ The painting is from the first period of the artist. It is signed and dated lower left. — Christ Blessing the Children (1653, 206x154cm) _ Born in Dordrecht, Maes went to Amsterdam in about 1650 to study with Rembrandt. He was back in his native city by 1653 and stayed until 1673, when he returned to settle in Amsterdam. By 1654 he had abandoned Rembrandt's way of painting in favour of small domestic interiors depicting the life of women and children. They differ from similar subjects painted by de Hooch in their extensive use of glossy black and warm reds, and the strong contrasts between light and dark, but some share de Hooch's interest in views into another room or space - although we don't know of any direct connection between the two painters. From 1660 Maes confined himself to portraiture, in time adopting the elegant French style favoured in Holland in the latter part of the century. The attribution of this huge picture has been the subject of much debate, but it is now generally accepted as an early work by Maes painted either during his time in Rembrandt's studio or just after. One of his two surviving preparatory compositional sketches is loosely based on Rembrandt's famous Hundred Guilder Print. Both works illustrate a passage from the Gospel of Saint Matthew: 'Then were there brought unto him little children, that he should put his hands on them, and pray: and the disciples rebuked them. But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven' (19:13-14). In Maes's picture dark browns and blacks are enlivened with touches of cream and red - most striking in the cheeks of the little girl on whom Jesus has 'put his hands' and who turns around shyly and uncomprehendingly, finger in mouth. Her school slate hangs at her side - for these are seventeenth-century Dutch mothers and children who crowd around Jesus, although he, like Saint Peter standing rebuked behind the tree and the man lifting up the child (a disciple removing an infant, or a father jumping the queue?), is wearing 'timeless' dress. The young man awkwardly squeezed in at the left is likely to be a self portrait, a reminder that this picture is dated to Maes's late 'teens. He has followed all the precepts for monumental narrative painting - the full-length figures on the scale of life, a significant and elevated biblical story, the poses and emotions of all the figures carefully delineated, the lights and darks disposed so as to highlight Jesus and the children - yet something genre-like and sentimental keeps breaking through. Whether because most patrons with space on their walls for a canvas of this size wanted something loftier than the homely figures depicted here, or whether Maes himself realised that 'history painting' was not what he wished to do, he was never again to attempt a picture on this ambitious scale. — Justus Criex (1666, 109x92cm) _ Maes executed this portrait during, or immediately after, his visit to Antwerp. In this period he already moved away from the style of Rembrandt and became influenced by Flemish painters, especially Jacob Jordaens whom he visited in Antwerp. — Eavesdropper with a Scolding Woman (1655, 46x72cm) _ Maes's fame rests primarily on his genre paintings of the intimate life of women and children made at Dordrecht during the 1650s. In this witty picture a maid quietly smiles at us as she points to the room upstairs, making us complicitous in overhearing a scolding mistress. Maes generated ambiguity by hiding the object of the woman's wrath with the illusionistic curtain. To the left, utensils have tumbled over, lying idle. By opening the curtain, the painter literally reveals a badly managed household: the maid spends more time listening than working, and the mistress does not create domestic harmony. — The Idle Servant (1655, 70x53cm) _ The range of Mae's domestic subjects is large. They show women praying, spinning, sewing, making lace, preparing food, or teaching children - all virtuous activities related to the centrality and sanctity of the home in Dutch society. A few of his pictures have veiled erotic allusions and there are some that call attention to vices. A good natured one in the latter category is The Idle Servant. The protagonist of the picture is a housewife appealing directly to us to witness the sloth of the sleeping servant who not only left her mess of pots and dishes unwashed but allows the cat to snatch a fowl. The painting's strong chiaroscuro relates it to Rembrandt but Maes's personal contribution is the emphasis he places upon creating the illusion of interior space in which the scene is set. Here the stress on the expanse of the floor is not fully successful - the pots and dishes are dangerously close to sliding off it. More importantly, he allows us to look from one room to another where conversing women introduce a minor sub-plot. The Dutch call this a kind of glimpse, a 'doorkijkje' (the diminutive of doorkijk = a look or glance). Maes did not invent the motif. It was used expertly as early as the fifteenth century by an artist unimaginatively called Hand G (variously identified as Jan van Eyck, his assistant, or his follower) on a manuscript page that shows St Elizabeth in her lying-in room after the birth of St John the Baptist. Later artists used the motif too, but Maes gave it new life when he painted a number of domestic scenes in settings similar or more elaborate than the one seen in The Idle Servant. All of them share a great sensitivity to the quality of light and atmospheric effects, and some anticipate the glorious interiors painted in Delft by Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch merely a few years later. — The Lacemaker (1655) _ The range of Mae's domestic subjects is large. They show women praying, spinning, sewing, making lace, preparing food, or teaching children - all virtuous activities related to the centrality and sanctity of the home in Dutch society. — Old Woman Dozing (1656, 135x105cm) _ This domestic scene - a superb example of the Dutch genre tableau - also has, though less obviously for a modern viewer, a moralising purpose as an allegory of sloth or laziness. An old woman has fallen asleep while reading. In her heavily veined right hand, resting on an open book on her lap, she holds a pair of reading glasses. Here the artist not only depicts tellingly a universally recognisable scene of human behaviour. Using pictorial language which would have been immediately understood by a 17th century Calvinist, he expresses, via a number of objects in the room, a judgement - and a highly negative one at that - about this behaviour. This verdict contrasts sharply with the positive feelings of modern viewers, who are inclined to project their emotion or tenderness into the artist's intentions when looking at his model. In particularly older viewers, who will soon be called to give a reckoning of their deeds at the Last Judgement, are sharply reminded of the severe punishments that await them after their death if they forsake their daily duties. A key on the wall points revealingly to a page in an open Bible on the table, where the name of Amos, a prophet of doom, is clearly readable. An hourglass in which time is passing props up the heavy book. Neither age nor tiredness, following on a spiritual effort, can excuse the capitulation to a human weakness. The call to be constantly awake and vigilant is directed not only at the spiritual individual but also at citizens in their daily activities. On the corner of the red cloth-covered table, a lace cushion, with light falling onto it, draws our eye. This symbol of domestic industry has been pushed aside by the woman. This deeper meaning was repeated and supplemented in other paintings with similar motifs from the same period, Experts date this early work, in which Rembrandt's influence can be clearly felt, at around 1656. — Portrait of a Woman (1667, 90x72cm) _ Maes studied at Rembrandt from 1650 to 1654 and his early works show the influence of his master. After visiting Antwerp, where he saw the works of Rubens, Van Dych and Jordaens, his style changed and he became a popular portraitist. — A Woman Spinning (1655) _ The range of Mae's domestic subjects is large. They show women praying, spinning, sewing, making lace, preparing food, or teaching children - all virtuous activities related to the centrality and sanctity of the home in Dutch society. — Jacob Trip (1660, 88x68cm) _ The sitter was a rich merchant at Dordrecht who commissioned all famous portraitists of the period to paint his portrait. A portrait of Jacob Trip was painted by Rembrandt (who also painted Maria Trip). Portrait of a Burgomaster, Jacobus Trip is by Helst. Maes was influenced by the style of Rembrandt when executing this portrait. The companion-piece of the painting represents the wife of Jacob Trip. — Portrait of Margaretha de Geer, Wife of Jacob Trip (1660, 88x68cm) _ This is the companion-piece of the protrait representing Jacob Trip. Mrs. Trip was also portrayed by Rembrandt. |
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