Willem van Mieris

Private collection, France. 

Willem van Mieris painted numerous small portraits on oval wooden supports throughout his career. This small-scale portrait type evolved from the practice of miniature painting, traditionally executed in watercolor or gouache on vellum and held in great esteem by the late sixteenth century. These miniatures in turn evolved from medieval manuscript illumination. Van Mieris, along with other painters from the Leiden School in the seventeenth century, transformed the portrait miniature into small-scale cabinet pictures like the present works, which provide the viewer the full qualities of easel painting on a reduced scale. Similar to miniatures, a key function of these small portraits was to serve as a reminder or keepsake of a distant friend or lover. These cabinet sized portraits also display van Mieris’ meticulous attention to detail, smoothness of the paint surface and refined treatment of color, all hallmarks of the Leiden fijnschilder technique.

In the signed and dated portrait a rather portly, middle-aged sitter, wearing a fanciful costume and placed in an outdoor setting, gazes sidelong to his left, smiling. The autumnal dark greens, burnt orange and crimson of his costume harmonize beautifully with the hues of the deep orange sky and dark horizon of eventide. The sitter so closely resembles the figure portrayed in The Merry Toper, dated 1699, in the collection of the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden (inv. no. Gal. 1768), that they appear to be one and the same model, the crimson waistcoat and the feathered hat almost identical. Assuming that the sitter is indeed the same in The Merry Toper, the present pair of paintings can also be dated to the end of the 1690s. The figure in the pendant portrait is portrayed in an interior with a sheet of paper suspended from the wall to his left, regarding the beholder with a knowing smile. He wears a deep green, velvet beret with red silk ear flaps. The deep folds of a floppy white ruff counter balance the folds of his chin which is supported by his left hand. His smiling features, together with the fanciful beret, suggest the man is a jester.

Willem van Mieris was a painter and draughtsman who trained with his father Frans van Mieris (1635-1681) and contributed to several of his father’s later works. The earliest examples that are signed and dated by Willem himself date from 1682, after which he produced a large oeuvre of dated works up to the 1730s, when the artist became partially blind. In 1693 van Mieris joined the Leiden Guild of St. Luke, for which he served as Headman several times and once as Dean. In around 1694, he founded a drawing academy together with Jacob Toorenvliet (circa 1635-1719) and Carel de Moor (1655-1738), which he and De Moor directed until 1736. Early in his career Willem concentrated on history painting and genre scenes. Eventually he became established as a portraitist in his native Leiden, and his ability in painting landscape is clearly illustrated by the present portrait pair. After 1700 Van Mieris focused on genre scenes in shops and kitchen interiors featuring arched windows, usually with a painted bas-relief below. Their coloring became cooler and the light more evenly diffused.