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Lot Essay
Jan van Mieris, the eldest son of Frans van Mieris the Elder (1635-1681), was originally destined to become a history painter of large-scale works, to which end his father had planned for him to study with the great Gerard de Lairesse (1640-1711) until rumors about the latter’s licentious lifestyle made him change his mind. Jan’s precocious talents quickly matured nonetheless and he developed into a versatile artist, painting Biblical and mythological subjects, genre scenes and portraits, invariably of the cabinet format already favored by his father. His promising career was cut short in 1690, when he died at the age of thirty, while seeking his fortune in Italy. Hence, his oeuvre is small and his works quite rare.
This highly-refined panel, which for a long time was thought to be the work of Frans on account of its excellent quality and a false signature and date (which disappeared during a cleaning before 1991), is a masterpiece by Jan datable to the mid-1680s – or, in the words of Otto Naumann, the artist's 'single greatest work' (private communication, 20 January 2026). In her recent catalogue raisonné, Margreet van der Hut noted its similarity with the artist's Minerva, Patroness of the Sciences, dated 1685 (op. cit., no. 36). Jan’s father had in fact painted his own allegorical depiction of Painting in 1661 (fig. 1; Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum). Jan’s decision to paint his own interpretation of the subject can be seen both as an act of homage to Frans’s painting, and as a self-assured and successful attempt to emulate his illustrious father. Interestingly, in his Groot schilderboek (Great Book of Painting) of 1707, de Lairesse extensively praises an allegory of painting by van Mieris (op. cit.). This has usually been taken to refer to Frans’s painting now in Los Angeles on account of the size ('van een palmhandts lengte') relayed by de Lairesse, whereas his description of the picture as showing a woman to the knee and holding a mask tallies more closely with the present work.
Jan characterizes the woman personifying the Art of Painting as melancholically contemplating a classical statuette of Apollo that evokes the concept of ideal beauty. The same statue appears in Frans's Gyges Spying on the Wife of Candaules (Schwerin, Staatliches Museum) and again in Jan's Painter Smoking a Pipe in his Workshop (op. cit., no. 39). Jan loosely follows the description in Cesare Ripa’s authoritative Iconologia, according to which Pittura is a fair woman with black hair. In her hand, she holds a gold chain with a mask attached to it, which stands for Imitatio, the artist’s skill to depict the real world in a deceptively lifelike manner. Jan also included the tools of the painter’s craft: a palette and brushes lie ready on the stone balustrade. A primed panel showing a sketch in white chalk no doubt alludes to Disegno, the intellectual starting point of artistic endeavour. In the background is seen a grinding stone and bottles containing varnish and linseed oil. This meticulously executed scene epitomizes Jan van Mieris’s vision of art. In it he succeeded in reconciling the typically Dutch penchant for detail and realism with a taste for Classicism.
Van der Hut proposed that this painting once formed a pendant with Jan's similarly-sized Allegory of Poetry, formerly in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, and the House of Wettin (op. cit., no. 37).
This highly-refined panel, which for a long time was thought to be the work of Frans on account of its excellent quality and a false signature and date (which disappeared during a cleaning before 1991), is a masterpiece by Jan datable to the mid-1680s – or, in the words of Otto Naumann, the artist's 'single greatest work' (private communication, 20 January 2026). In her recent catalogue raisonné, Margreet van der Hut noted its similarity with the artist's Minerva, Patroness of the Sciences, dated 1685 (op. cit., no. 36). Jan’s father had in fact painted his own allegorical depiction of Painting in 1661 (fig. 1; Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum). Jan’s decision to paint his own interpretation of the subject can be seen both as an act of homage to Frans’s painting, and as a self-assured and successful attempt to emulate his illustrious father. Interestingly, in his Groot schilderboek (Great Book of Painting) of 1707, de Lairesse extensively praises an allegory of painting by van Mieris (op. cit.). This has usually been taken to refer to Frans’s painting now in Los Angeles on account of the size ('van een palmhandts lengte') relayed by de Lairesse, whereas his description of the picture as showing a woman to the knee and holding a mask tallies more closely with the present work.
Jan characterizes the woman personifying the Art of Painting as melancholically contemplating a classical statuette of Apollo that evokes the concept of ideal beauty. The same statue appears in Frans's Gyges Spying on the Wife of Candaules (Schwerin, Staatliches Museum) and again in Jan's Painter Smoking a Pipe in his Workshop (op. cit., no. 39). Jan loosely follows the description in Cesare Ripa’s authoritative Iconologia, according to which Pittura is a fair woman with black hair. In her hand, she holds a gold chain with a mask attached to it, which stands for Imitatio, the artist’s skill to depict the real world in a deceptively lifelike manner. Jan also included the tools of the painter’s craft: a palette and brushes lie ready on the stone balustrade. A primed panel showing a sketch in white chalk no doubt alludes to Disegno, the intellectual starting point of artistic endeavour. In the background is seen a grinding stone and bottles containing varnish and linseed oil. This meticulously executed scene epitomizes Jan van Mieris’s vision of art. In it he succeeded in reconciling the typically Dutch penchant for detail and realism with a taste for Classicism.
Van der Hut proposed that this painting once formed a pendant with Jan's similarly-sized Allegory of Poetry, formerly in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, and the House of Wettin (op. cit., no. 37).