Willem van Mieris

WILLEM VAN MIERIS 1662 - Leiden - 1747 Willem van Mieris was born in Leiden, the fourth son of the painter Frans van Mieris the Elder (1635-1681). Willem studied with his father, an internationally renowned and highly-paid artist who also taught Willem’s eldest brother Jan. Willem’s first dated work is of 1682. The following year he entered the Leiden guild, holding the post of hoofdman in 1697, 1698, 1704 and 1708, and that of dean in 1699. In 1694, with fellow artists Jacob Toorenvliet and Karel de Moor, Willem founded a drawing academy in Leiden, which he directed until 1736. In the 1730s van Mieris’s sight began to fail and his output of paintings declined. He died in Leiden in 1747. Van Mieris painted genre, religious, historical and mythological subjects, usually on a small scale and with an attention to detail and smooth, polished execution which gives almost an ‘enamelled’ effect. From the beginning of the eighteenth century he specialised particularly in shops and kitchens seen through arched windows (a framing device invented in the 1640s in the work of Gerrit Dou). When the demand for genre scenes declined towards the end of van Mieris’s career, he turned more to elegant small-scale portraits. Mieris also made four clay models for bas-reliefs intended for garden vases, depicting the Four Seasons (Windsor Castle). Willem van Mieris’s painting was much sought after in his own lifetime. Among his prominent patrons were the wealthy Leiden cloth magnate Pieter de la Court van der Voort (1664-1739) and his nephew Cornelis Backer (1693-1775). For van der Voort, Mieris made many new compositions, as well as copies of his father’s work and that of other Leiden fijnschilders. During his lifetime, his work was acquired by Christoph August von Wackerbarth for Augustus the Strong of Saxony. Van Mieris’s principal pupils were his son Frans van Mieris the Younger (1689-1763) and Hieronymous van der Mij (1678-1761). The work of Willem van Mieris is represented in the Mauritshuis, The Hague; the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; the Wallace Collection, London and the Louvre, Paris.