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Category: Nicolaes Maes

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Painters of the middle class

There’s no shame in painting what people love, as long as you do it well.
Two chattering housewives, 1655, Nicolaes Maes, courtesy Dordrechts Museum
If I weren’t in Buffalo, I could fly to see Nicolaes Maes: Dutch Master of the Golden Age, opening on February 22 at the National Gallery in London. (London and Los Angeles are roughly equidistant from my house, so that’s not as daft as it seems.)
The Dutch Golden Age (the 17th century, roughly) was when trade brought prosperity to the Netherlands. That, in turn, fostered a flowering of scientific thought, military might and culture. The conditions that made this possible were the nation’s recent liberation from Spanish rule, a solid Protestant work ethic, and the development of a new kind of business: the corporation.
The Dutch East India Company was founded in 1602. It was the first multinational corporation and it was created by exchanging shares on the first modern stock exchange. This may seem humdrum to us, but at a time when for most of the world wealth and poverty were inherited conditions, it allowed for the creation of thriving merchant and middle classes.
The Eavesdropper, 1657, Nicolaes Maes, courtesy Dordrechts Museum
Until the Dutch Golden Age, great art was commissioned by extremely wealthy people, who essentially dictated the tastes of the times. Suddenly, middle class people were buying art. This radically changed what artists painted.
The Dutch Reformed church and Dutch nationalism informed the aesthetic of Golden Age painting. Catholic Baroque was out; simplicity and Calvinist austerity were in. Dutch art concentrated on reality and ordinary life at all levels of society. The focus on realism is why the period is sometimes called Dutch Realism.
Always that realism was invested with meaning. Significant in this worldview was a rapid growth in landscape painting, particularly as it represented unique Dutch values and scenes. A windmill on a flat plain or a boat at sea may seem like tropes today, but they were symbols of heroism to the audience of the time.
The Dutch painted lavish still lives that seem overly full and overripe to modern eyes. They were simultaneously objects of beauty, symbols of abundance, and full of symbolic meaning. Among these are floral vanitas paintings, done with scientific accuracy while warning us of our ultimate destiny.
The Virtuous Woman, c. 1656, Nicolaes Maes, courtesy Wallace Collection
Genre painting underwent a renaissance, because home and hearth were as important to these middle-class buyers as they were irrelevant to princes elsewhere. Nicolaes Maes was among the most important of these genre painters. After studying with Rembrandt for five years, he hung out his shingle, first in Dordrecht and then in Amsterdam. Like so many artists, he didn’t specialize in the beginning, painting whatever was necessary to make a living. After about 1660 he focused on lucrative portrait paintings. It was a good strategy, because he died a very wealthy man.
The contemporary American artist has two broad market paths open to him. The first is to produce conceptual art that is meaningful to high-flyers in New York. The second is to produce work that appeals to middle-class buyers. If the latter is your target audience you can learn a lot by studying the careers and subjects of Maes and his peers.
There are those who sneer at plein air painting even as it develops into the largest modern movement in painting. But the critical message of the Dutch Golden Age is that there’s no shame in painting what people love, as long as you do it well.
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Two old-timers debate the future

“Barge Haulers on the Volga (Burlaki), 1870–73, Ilya Repin

“Barge Haulers on the Volga (Burlaki), 1870–73, Ilya Repin
Last night I heard from an old friend. I met him through his kids, who are of an age with mine. He’s 57 years old and leaving next week for Puerto Rico to start graduate school. “It depends on my mother and my kids,” he said, “but my intention is to leave the country to teach English.”
My home town of Buffalo has been clinically depressed since the middle of the last century. This makes it a great place to be from. Either you left at 18 or you slog it out until retirement, at which time you escape the snow and taxes by moving to Florida, the Carolinas, or Arizona. (Sound familiar?)
Portrait of the Artist's Mother at 63," 1514, Albrecht DĂĽrer

Portrait of the Artist’s Mother at 63,” 1514, Albrecht Dürer
In 1917, George Eastman built the Eastman Dental Dispensary to provide dental care to indigent children. It’s been closed for a while, but is now being converted to low-cost housing for seniors. “Do you realize I qualify to live in that place?” my friend asked. I myself can’t imagine a more depressing place to end my years, since there isn’t a decent store in miles. It would be day after day of hobbling painfully through slushy downtown streets to one’s bus stop while impatient New Yorkers sound their horns.  Give me the village almshouse any day.
When America was still a rural Arcadia, old timers lived with their kids. As a person’s capacity for hard physical labor slowly declined, they were assigned less onerous tasks, like child care, sewing, cooking and gardening.
“Old man sleeping,” 1872, Nikolaos Gyzis

“Old man sleeping,” 1872, Nikolaos Gyzis
The Industrial Revolution really messed this up. There is no room for Grandma or Grandpa in urban America. Our kids live in very small flats, if they’re not working in Hong Kong. There are no fireplaces, and no babies to dandle on one’s knee.
It was actually the Great Depression that rang the death knell for multi-generational families. Faced with a choice of providing for children or parents, the only solution for America’s poorest families was to send Granny to the poorhouse. These locally-financed institutions were—as were a lot of things then—overburdened and meager. The terrible condition of America’s elderly in the 1930s is why we ended up with our current Social Security system.
“Old Woman Dozing,” 1656, Nicolaes Maes

“Old Woman Dozing,” 1656, Nicolaes Maes
The problem is, we’re living longer and longer, and we’re healthier while we do it. According to the nifty Social Security life expectancy calculator, I should live until 86; my friend until 83 (someone ought to do something about that actuarial gender bias, by the way). Assuming we retain our marbles, there’s time for a whole second career there.
That’s especially true in a society which is making its workers redundant not at 65, but at 50 or 55. By delaying our Social Security benefits until 66 and 10 months, the government has told my age cohort that it wants us working longer. It hasn’t, however, given us any means of forcing someone to keep employing us.
On the other hand, twenty, thirty or forty years is just way too long to spend playing golf. So what’s a poor rebellious Son of Toil to do? Head elsewhere. Reinvent oneself. Do something meaningful.
Take up painting, obviously.