Willem van Mieris

Pieter Langerhuizen (1839-1918), Bussum (L.2095),

his sale, Amsterdam, F. Muller, 29ff April 1919, lot 550;

sale, Amsterdam, F. Muller, 15 June 1926 (Comte de Robiano Collection and others), lot 403

The surviving drawings of Willem van Mieris are mostly either rapid studies of single figures or small groupings, or highly finished works like this one, which were clearly made, often on vellum, as independent works of art in their own right. Some of these finished drawings on vellum are executed in bright colours, creating an effect almost like a manuscript illumination.

Occasionally, Mieris made versions of the same composition in different media, and there also exists a fine painting on panel, on the same scale as the drawing and with almost exactly the same composition.¹ In these cases, it is not clear which of these related yet independent works was made first, as the present drawing was clearly conceived as a separate, finished work of art, not as a study for a painting. It is, though, reasonable to assume that the drawing would have been made at around the same time as the painting, which is signed and dated 1709.

The rather sensual subject-matter seen here is extremely typical of Mieris’s paintings and finished drawings, and he made at least three other very refined drawings on vellum of Lot and his Daughters, one of them, in Copenhagen, belonging to his series of copies after the sculptures of Francis van Bossuit, the others (in the Louvre and formerly in the Van Leeuwen collection) presumably his own inventions.²

For further information on the function of drawings in Van Mieris’s work, and on his drawings after sculpture, see the informative articles by Emke Elen-Clifford Kocq van Breugel.³

We are most grateful to Dr. Albert Elen for his help while cataloguing this drawing.

¹   Sold, New York, Sotheby's, 25 January 2008, lot 319

² Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst, inv. Tu 54/5; Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. RF 22.753; sale, Amsterdam, Christie’s, 24 November 1992, lot 136

³   E. Elen-Clifford Kocq van Breugel, 'Tekeningen van Willem van Mieris (1662-1747) in relatie tot zijn schilderijen', Leids Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 4 (1985), pp. 149-164; Idem, 'Sculpturen van Francis Bosuit getekend door Willem van Mieris', Delineavit et Sculpsit, nr. 8 (October 1992), pp. 12-24