Portrait of a Lady as Diana

Portrait of a Lady as Diana belongs to Maes's late fashionable phase, when allegorical or mythological identifications for female sitters became a fashionable convention borrowed from English and French portraiture. Presenting a woman as Diana — goddess of the hunt and the moon — implied chastity, independence, and aristocratic leisure. This tradition, associated especially with Sir Peter Lely's English court portraits, filtered into Dutch practice via the influence of the Orangist court and international art commerce. For Maes, the goddess portrait allowed him to add costumes, crescent moon attributes, and naturalistic settings that gave his compositions more variety than the plain background portraits that dominated his output. The work's undated attribution to 1680 places it in the final decade of his life, when these allegorical commissions were at their most fashionable.

The allegorical format requires Maes to integrate portrait-quality face painting with figure or nature elements — hunting costumes, a bow, a hound, a landscape — handled in his looser late brushwork. The face retains the warmest and most carefully layered paint. Cooler greens and blues in any landscape background contrast with the warm flesh tones, creating a natural brightness.