The Listening Housewife

Nicolaes Maes had trained in Amsterdam under Rembrandt, and you feel it in the warm light and deep shadow. But back home in Dordrecht in the 1650s he made something of his own: a small run of paintings about eavesdropping. In this one a housewife pauses on the stairs, a finger raised, catching a pair of lovers murmuring in the cellar below. She isn't scandalised. She turns and looks straight out at us, sharing the joke, drawing us in as fellow snoops. Maes builds the whole scene on a device the Dutch called a doorkijkje, a view through a doorway from one room into the next. He liked the idea enough to paint several versions; another hangs in the Wallace Collection in London.