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Evert Crijnsz. van der Maes (1577-1656)
Ensign of the Orange Company of the St. Sebastian civic guard, The Hague. Signed and dated 1617. Canvas, 200 × 103 cm.

The Hague, Gemeente-museum, inv. nr. 314. (Under nr. 227, the museum holds a painting of another ensign of the St. Sebastian civic guard, with nearly the same dimensions, and a very similar, symmetrical composition. That work is signed by Joachim Ottensz. Houckgeest and dated 1621.)

In The Hague there were two civic guards: the old, aristocratic St. George Guards, and the bourgeois St. Sebastian Guards. This unidentified ensign was attached to one of the four companies of the St. Sebastian Guards. The officers of the guards – captains, lieutenants and ensigns – were usually men of some importance in the civic and business life of the town.

The painter Evert Crijnsz. van der Maes came from the same circles as his sitter. His brother Seger Crijnsz. van der Maes was captain of one of the other companies of St. Sebastian from 1614 to 1620, and in the year of this portrait became an alderman of The Hague. Seger himself was a painter of stained-glass windows – and of banners! The van der Maeses shared their prominence in the world of official Hague painting with the van Ravesteyns. In 1616, for example, Jan Anthonisz. van Ravesteyn (ca. 1572-1657) painted the officers of the Orange company on the steps of the town hall after being received by the burgomasters, and in 1618 immortalized a reception of the combined St. Sebastian Guards, of which he was one, for the burgomasters. In the preceding generation, the fathers of van der Maes and Ravesteyn had collaborated on stained-glass commissions for The Hague in 1593 and 1602. We are in the presence of what one might call a military-artistic complex, of a kind one also encounters in Amsterdam in the same years.

For Seger Crijnsz. van der Maes and Ravesteyn, see Martin 1923-24, Bredius and Moes 1881.