Of the painters bearing the name Van Mieris the most considerable was Frans van Mieris, surnamed the Elder, to distinguish him from his grandson, Frans van Mieris the Younger. Between them came Willem van Mieris, and the merit of the three as artists corresponds with the order of their succession.
The elder Frans, born at Leyden in 1635, became a pupil of Gerard Dou, though, like the latter, he had first been taught by a painter on glass. The earliest part of his career was still within the best period of Holland genre, but before he died in 1681 the decline was come; and it was to this that his son and pupil, Willem, succeeded. Willem’s pictures are still clever but tricky, hard and glossy in texture, trivial and often silly in motive. As for his son, Frans the Younger, he belongs to the decadence, and the Dutch consider his pictures of no merit. There was still another Mieris, Jan by name, the brother of Willem, who, however, lived mostly abroad and died at the age of thirty in Rome.
Frans the Elder was popular in his own day and continued to be held in high esteem by collectors of the eighteenth century. He has been ranked with Metsu, but not with justice to the latter, for some of his work betrays that pettiness of motive and method which marked the decadence of genre and has been aptly called the “snuff-box” style. On the other hand, he had his moments of more genuine artistry, when he would paint a picture that even in comparison with Metsu is acceptable. These are chiefly to be found in the galleries of Munich, Vienna, and St. Petersburg. Among the Munich examples is The Sick Woman; she seems to have sunk to the floor in a faint and is being tended by an old woman, while a doctor in the shaded background is holding up a bottle of cordial to the light and gazing at it—a figure very familiar in Dutch genre. Unfortunately the subject suggests Jan Steen and the superior esprit with which he would have treated it. The lady wears a reddish jacket trimmed with white fur, and the same garment reappears in The Oyster Breakfast. Here a girl is seated at a table holding an oyster in one hand and a wine-glass in the other. The picture represents the finer side of Van Mieris, though it is surpassed by another example in the Munich Gallery, The Girl Before a Mirror, which possesses the quality that has suggested the coupling of this artist’s name with that of Metsu.
In the Art-History Museum of Vienna is A Lady and Her Doctor, in which he stands feeling her pulse as she sits beside a bed. It is sentimentally imagined, but extremely clever in a superficial way, the fabrics being imitated with extraordinary skill. Far more satisfactory is Cavalier in a Shop. On the right of the foreground is a mass of sumptuously colored stuffs, but the man’s costume and the jacket of the woman, who stands at a table offering something to his notice, are of black velvet. Beside her is a curtain of ashy purple, and the color of the background of the dim interior is a darkish olive, the whole forming a tonal scheme of subdued richness. But the cavalier is chucking the woman under the chin, her coy smile responding to his smile of amorous complacency, while an old man out of the shadow of the ingle-nook watches them. It is this sort of thing, coupled with the skill in imitating textures, that especially commended this artist to the taste of the eighteenth century.
The decline of genre reflects the changed conditions of Holland society. For the old ideal of liberty had given way to one of money and the power that comes in its train. Statesmen, soldiers, and patriots had been succeeded by self-seeking politicians and ambitious tradesmen, who disdained to be burghers and aspired to the luxury and ostentation of merchant princes. “Taste” now became the shibboleth, and it was a taste that aped
LADY AT THE CLAVICHORD CASPAR NETSCHER
DRESDEN GALLERY