Portrait de femme (inscrit dans un ovale)

Portrait de femme inscrit dans un ovale (Portrait of a woman in an oval format) dates from 1657 and is held by Musées Nationaux Récupération — the French national museum holding for artworks recovered after World War II whose ownership has not yet been fully resolved. The oval format was fashionable in seventeenth-century portraiture as a convention borrowed from medal and cameo traditions, suggesting timeless commemoration rather than momentary likeness. Maes used oval compositions occasionally, typically for female sitters, and the framing device softens the hard rectangle of the canvas, lending the portrait an intimate, portable quality. The provenance history through MNR frames the work within the broader context of war-dispersed Dutch and Flemish collections, many of which were built by private collectors before being seized or sold under duress.

The oval framing creates compositional constraints that Maes turns to advantage: the figure must be tightly centred with no room for ancillary props or backgrounds, focusing everything on the sitter's face and upper costume. The paint within the oval is built up in Maes's characteristic warm-to-cool layering, while the spandrel areas outside the oval are simply painted dark to simulate a painted or carved frame.