In about 1650 Maes went to Amsterdam, where he studied with Rembrandt. Before his return to Dordrecht in 1654 Maes painted a few Rembrandtesque genre pictures, with life-size figures in deep glowing colours. In the period from 1655 to 1660 Maes devoted himself to domestic genre on a smaller scale, retaining to a great extent the use of colour he had learned from Rembrandt. His favourite subjects were women spinning or reading the Bible or preparing a meal. He visited Antwerp between 1660 and 1670, after which he devoted himself almost exclusively to portraiture, abandoning intimacy and glowing colour harmonies for a careless elegance that suggests the influence of Van Dyck. The change gave rise to a theory of the existence of another Maes, of Brussels.