Nicolaes Maes (1634-1693) was born in Dordrecht, Dutch Republic (today’s Netherlands). A disciple of Rembrandt, he was a pioneer genre painter, using new poses and facial expressions in portraits. Another of his contributions was introducing intricacy and storytelling to interior scenes by showing more than one room at a time in a painting. His compositions and use of objects and furniture was also influential on later artists like Jan Vermeer.

Joe Lloyd in Studio International about the Idle Servant:

Maes quickly developed a talent for narrative clarity, and for ever-more-complex arrangements of interior spaces. In The Idle Servant (1655), the lady of a house enters her kitchen to find her maid asleep on the floor before a clutter of uncleaned pots (behind, a cat steals a chicken). Gesturing towards her sleeping servant, Maes’s lady looks towards us with wry amusement. In the background, up a small staircase, we see the gathering the mistress has left, including her empty chair. Perhaps she has come to fetch more wine. Though Maes was not the first Dutch artist to depict a multi-roomed home, the narrative linking of the two spaces had seldom been so explicit. The pots and pans add elements of the still life, folding in another genre.

He painted six versions of The Eavesdropper and many others with a similar theme, for example Sleeping Man Having His Pockets Picked.