Nicolaes Maes, 'The Idle Servant', 1655

Although the title of this picture is Interior with a Sleeping Maid and her Mistress it has become known as The Idle Servant. The young woman is slumped on a stool, head in hand, taking a snooze after the hard work involved in preparing a large meal; heavy pots and pans litter the floor.

The pots – incidentally giving us an idea of how little such utensils have changed in 400 years – look clean and the maid herself, neat and respectable. Only the open neck and rolled up sleeves of her shirt and her heavy skirt mark her as different from her mistress in her snowy shift and impeccably pleated apron. Nicolaes Maes has posed the maid in the traditional position of Acedia, the personification of idleness – perhaps the reason for the change in title – but the mistress doesn‘t appear to be condemning her for a mortal sin. She shrugs her shoulders with a smile that seems to say, ’what am I to do with her?‘

Pots left on the floor and the cat trying to eat the raw goose behind the maid – a close look suggests that Maes had little idea about feline teeth – are evidence that this is, at the least, a happy-go-lucky household. There was a popular saying in Holland at the time: ’A kitchen maid must keep one eye on the pan and the other on the cat.‘ This maid is not managing to do either. Pictures like this were entertaining, but could also be used as an example of good – or bad – household management (look at Jan Steen’s The Effects of Intemperance, for example). Perhaps the rather staid-looking meal taking place in the room beyond the kitchen is an example of good behaviour in a polite family. The mistress’s smile also seems to suggest she’s glad to get away for a few moments.

The invention of showing a view of an interior room beyond the main room in the foreground, in this case up a short flight of stairs, is among the first of its kind. Maes took up the theme again several times, including in The Listening Housewife (Wallace Collection, London), though in that picture the scene in the smaller room is where the bad behaviour is taking place, with the maid, who is far from asleep, entertaining her admirer.

Maes was for a while a student of Rembrandt. Here he has used his master’s technique of chiaroscuro (’light dark', contrasting use of light and shade to create a dramatic effect) to pick out the important points in the story. The contrasts and rich colour lend atmosphere and demonstrate Maes’s considerable skills in portraying texture, mood and character – seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting at its finest.