Portrait of a Lady, Nicolaes Maes

Exhibition Label: "Empire of Things," 2013, Denise Giannino Maes spent the last three decades of his life in Amsterdam painting portraits of the city’s elite. During the 17th century, Amsterdam residents lived in an international trading hub bustling with the interchange of goods and peoples traveling between Europe, Africa, the Americas, and East Asia. Many Amsterdammers made their wealth from trade and celebrated their accumulated fortune through the acquisition of foreign goods that often appear in portraits. While much is still unknown about these sitters, they display an awareness of material culture beyond the borders of the Dutch Republic. The man wears a long powdered wig in emulation of contemporary French court fashion, and the woman shares in her husband’s elegance with her artfully disheveled dress. Both figures wear sumptuous swaths of silk, a material imported by the East India Company from China. The classical columns and dramatically revealed landscape backdrop suggest erudition acquired through the Grand Tour.