Willem van Mieris (3 June 166226 January 1747) was an 18th-century painter from the Dutch Republic.
Biography
Willem van Mieris was a painter, sculptor and etcher active in Leiden. He was born in Leiden and studied under his father Frans van Mieris the Elder (1635–1682), who was a successful genre painter. Willem had a reasonably successful career, being supported by a few patrons who commissioned and collected various of his works. His oeuvre consists mostly of genre and portraiture, with some landscape painting, as well as some sculptures. Van Mieris' style was that of the (painters in the "fine manner"), and his genre works, especially later in his career, depicted scenes from upper-class society.
At age 19, Van Mieris took over the family workshop after his father died in 1681, aged 45. He had barely finished his training in the family studio and it would take another two years before he entered the Leiden painters' guild in 1685. He set out to uphold his father's reputation as a Leiden fijnschilder. The Leiden fine painters produced a small scale of mostly genre paintings or portraits with high attention to detail, which was made popular by Frans' master Gerrit Dou (1613–1675), a Dutch Golden Age painter. Frans' superb skills as a painter rubbed off on his son and his influence can be seen in technique, subject matter, and style. He finished what was left incomplete on his father's demise. One year later, in 1684, he married his wife Agneta Chapman, whom he often used as his model.
Besides genre and portrait painting, Van Mieris was also a skilled landscape painter, etcher, and draughtsman; moreover, he also tried his hand at history painting with remarkable results. He acted as headman and once as dean of the Leiden Guild of St. Luke in 1693. A year later, in 1694, he founded a drawing academy in Leiden together with the painters Jacob Toorenvliet (c. 1636–1719) and Carel de Moor (1655–1738), which he and de Moor directed until 1736. At that time, Van Mieris stopped working as an artist because he became partially blind and no dated work passes the 1730s.
Van Mieris was born in a family of Dutch painters. Not only his father, but also his brother and son had a background in art. Jan van Mieris (1660–1690) studied under his father Frans the Elder, as well as under Gerard de Lairesse (1641–1711), to eventually become a genre and portrait painter. Willem's son, Frans van Mieris the Younger (1689–1763), was a pupil of his father. He worked as a genre painter and writer, and was considered a distinguished antiquary, who published works of merit on numismatics and history. Such a family background in art, good relationships with wealthy collectors and patrons, and apprenticeships with successful 17th-century masters seems to have made the choice of profession easier in families such as the Van Mierises. Willem, Jan, and Frans II, all direct descendants of the famous seventeenth century fine painter Frans I van Mieris, were bound for prestigious positions in the city, resulting in steady income from the commissions from affluent citizens.
Artistic career Style and influences The fijnschilders, whose activity was mainly concentrated in Leiden, included many of the most popular painters of the time, such as Gerard Dou and Willem's father: needless to say, the latter had a decisive influence in shaping young Willem's style. In fact, Frans van Mieris was among the most famous Dutch painters of the late 17th century, his popularity crossing the Netherlands' border time and again: he was highly esteemed by both Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany and Archduke Leopold of Palatinate, who was to become Emperor Leopold I. His paintings are mostly elegant genre scenes, but they show us the main features of the conception of painting: even in scenes representing trivial subjects, the Leiden painters strove for absolute perfection in rendering details and refining features in order to achieve absolute elegance. Willem van Mieris, having been introduced to, and trained in, painting by his father, could not but be heavily influenced by the ideas, ultimately becoming a member of the second generation of Leiden fine painters.
However, Willem van Mieris soon parted ways with Frans when it came to subject matter. In fact, although he still focused on genre painting, his works usually depict scenes taken from the life of the upper class, and even when the protagonists belong to the low spheres of the society, they look much more elegant and refined than their real-life counterparts. This is mainly due to the influence exerted on Willem van Mieris by Gerard de Lairesse, whose Groot Schilderboek, published in 1707, marked the transition from the 17th to the 18th century in Dutch art. In his extensive treatise, de Lairesse stated that the aim of genre painters should no longer be representing the human figure as it is (which was one of the pivotal features of Dutch Golden Age painting), but as it ought to be according to the classical canons of beauty. More specifically, de Lairesse claimed it was necessary to ennoble genre painting, in order to take it to the same level of excellence and public admiration awarded to history painting. To achieve this purpose, the Amsterdam art theoretician proposed that the human protagonists of genre painting (especially women), no matter which social class they belonged to, be represented after classical antiquity sculptures, with their unsurpassable perfection and proportion. De Lairesse's views fascinated Van Mieris, especially after he had the opportunity to experiment directly with classicizing figures thanks to the sculptures of the Flemish artist Francis van Bossuit, who had previously lived and worked in Italy and took inspiration from classical antiquity sculpture for his works. Van Mieris drew many illustrations after Bossuit's sculptures, and borrowed some of their poses for his paintings.
Another distinctive feature of van Mieris's oeuvre is the repetition of certain figures and poses in many of his paintings. This phenomenon, which was actually widespread among both Dutch 18th century history and genre painters, can yet again be tracked back to the new classicizing tendencies of Dutch art. In fact, the social scenario in the Netherlands changed dramatically after 1672, the so-called "year of calamities", and the subsequent war against France, England, and several German states: the aftermath of the conflict saw most of the commercial power of Holland ending up shattered, thus drastically reducing the number of rich collectors interested in buying new works of art. Subsequently, the painters started to modify their style in order to get accustomed with the predominant taste of the few, powerful regents left in the country, who usually aimed at formally elegant and proportionate paintings rather than truthful representations of real life such as those produced during the Golden Age. Thus, artists like Willem van Mieris, who dedicated himself both to history and genre painting, started using figures taken from mythological and biblical works in genre scenes, trying to present them either as common people or, more frequently, as exponents of the nobility, of course with an appropriate background setting (e.g. a richly decorated Palladian villa). Moreover, reusing the same motifs and figures in several paintings allowed the artists to save time and energy, thus leading them to produce more works and having more possibilities of finding an interested collector.
Willem van Mieris' artistic approach to painting included the repetition of similar figures and the features of figures. This approach provided both practical and aesthetic benefits to the artist. Not only did it allow the artist to be highly productive in the studio, it also allowed him to trademark his own type of idealized female figure throughout his oeuvre. Comparisons have been drawn between Willem van Mieris and Gerard ter Borch, another Dutch genre painter of the Dutch Golden Age, who used the technique of repeating figures to realize their common goal of increasing productivity while reducing labour. Willem van Mieris has also been compared to artists like Gerard ter Borch, Gerard Dou, and Jan Steen, for their shared artistic approach to painting which involved designing a group of interacting figures first, and subsequently designing the setting which the figures occupied.
Painters like Willem van Mieris reused not only their own figures, but also those present in paintings by the masters of the previous generations. This was again due to the necessity of pleasing the few patrons and collectors, who greatly admired the works of artists such as Gerard Dou, a member of the first generation of fijnschilders. Willem van Mieris explicitly refers to Dou in two different paintings the subject of which is almost directly borrowed from the eminent master. In this respect, Van Mieris proved to be discreet enough to carefully choose which elements to take from other painters' works in order not to be accused of plagiarism, which was already an issue at the time. In fact, specific guidelines had already been established about how to refer to paintings by previous masters without ending up with mere copies of their work, which were obviously despised as signs of the painter's incapability of producing a work on his own.
One of the major characteristics of Willem van Mieris' artistic style is his idealization of the female nude. Van Mieris' idea of beauty in genre paintings is deeply rooted in and modeled after his studies of classical sculpture. The artist's reference to classical sculpture follows the instructions outlined by Gerard de Lairesse for the improvement of genre painting in his book Groot Schilderboek. De Lairesse suggested that artists should refer to classical sculpture to create an idealized female nude form and should adapt this form to ordinary women within the context of genre painting, a suggestion that is evidently followed by Willem van Mieris throughout his genre paintings.
One of Willem van Mieris' major influences was Francis van Bossuit (1635–1692). Van Bossuit studied Italian sculpture in Rome and was esteemed as a sculptor in Amsterdam from 1680 until his death. Willem van Mieris turned to Van Bossuit's classicized sculptures to develop his own aesthetic for portraying idealized female nudes. Frits Scholten, the senior curator of sculpture at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, has suggested that Willem van Mieris borrowed poses and gestures directly from Francis van Bossuit's sculptures and applied them throughout his own oeuvre. Between the years 1669 and 1702, Willem van Mieris made at least thirteen drawings on parchment modeled after van Bossuit's sculptures, believed to have been produced as works of art rather than preparatory studies for his history paintings.
Models