97

Nicolaes Maes (1634-1693)
The eavesdropper. Signed and dated 1657. Canvas, 92.5 × 122 cm.

The Netherlands Office for Fine Arts, inv.nr.NK 2560 (on loan to Dordrechts Museum).

Here too a mystery is being depicted. Beneath the carved head of Juno, the goddess of marriage and the household, a young woman cautions us to be quiet and listen. Her position in the painting makes her a binding figure between the established household at the table upstairs and the young lovers downstairs. The wild sexual attraction between youngsters who think they invented love is about to set into the cement of a bourgeois marriage. What they are brewing in secret in the kitchen will later be served up in public in the dining room. All to the amusement of the knowing eavesdropper who has seen this happen so many times before. We are drawn into a conspiracy of silence by her gesture.

The scene bears a striking resemblance to one sketched by Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy, which I print here for fellow lovers of that book: 'My mother was going very gingerly in the dark along the passage which led to the parlour, as my uncle Toby pronounced the word wife. – 'Tis a shrill, penetrating sound of itself, and Obadiah had helped it by leaving the door a little a-jar, so that my mother heard enough of it, to imagine herself the subject of the conversation: so laying the edge of her finger across her two lips–holding in her breath, and bending her head a little downwards, with a twist of her neck –(not towards the door, but from it, by which means her ear was brought to the chink)–she listened with all her powers:–the listening slave, with the Goddess of Silence at his back, could not have given a finer thought for an intaglio.' Or for a Dutch picture.

The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman, in eleven volumes, London (Tonson) 1771, vol. 5, chap. 5, p. 202. Exhib. cat. Tot lering en vermaak, cat.nr.34.