Bathing children

Nicolaes Maes's Bathing Children from around 1650, in the Louvre, is an early genre painting created during or shortly after his period of study with Rembrandt in Amsterdam. The intimate domestic subject of children being bathed by their mother shows Maes developing the themes of maternal care and household life that would become his specialty. The painting's warm, Rembrandtesque lighting and intimate domestic focus distinguish Maes from the more socially ambitious genre painters of his generation.

The warm palette and soft chiaroscuro clearly reveal Rembrandt's influence on Maes's early work. The intimate scale and the tender rendering of the mother-child interaction anticipate the domestic genre scenes that would define his subsequent career.