The Lacemaker

Nicolaes Maes

Oil on canvas

Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Lacemaker depicts a young mother intently engaged in making bobbin lace using a lace pillow, while her infant sits in a wooden highchair beside her, gazing directly out at the viewer. The composition is unified by the recurring use of red—on the mother's bodice, the child's cap, and the tablecloth—a hallmark device in Maes's domestic genre scenes of the 1650s. Born in Dordrecht in 1634, Maes trained under Rembrandt in Amsterdam and brought his master's warm chiaroscuro and rich tonality to intimate scenes of everyday Dutch life. As one of the most inventive genre painters of the Dutch Golden Age, Maes helped shape the conventions of interior domestic painting, influencing contemporaries such as Johannes Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch.