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Lot Essay
Willem van Mieris spent much of his career in Leiden working in the style of his father, Frans, with whom he had trained. Van Mieris’s work often comprised genre scenes and portraits, but with the prominence of pictures from history, mythology and literature in the hierarchy of genres, he also focused his attention on history painting and religious scenes.
This meticulously detailed work, dated 1705, is a beautiful example of Van Mieris’s mature style and his subtle mastery in painting idyllic mythological subjects. The picture shows the famous judgement of Paris, initially derived from Homer’s Iliad and a perennially popular subject for artists from the early 16th century onwards and, indeed, one which Van Mieris himself returned to a number of times. At the wedding feast of the Greek hero Peleus and his bride, the nymph Thetis, the snubbed goddess of Discord, Eris, had cast a golden apple among the guests as a ‘prize’ for the most beautiful, to which Juno, Minerva and Venus all laid vehement claim. Zeus, declining to judge, ruled that the Trojan prince, Paris, should decide the winner. Each goddess famously promised the prince a tantalising prize: Juno offered to make him king of Europe and Asia; Minerva to give him wisdom and military prowess; and Venus offered him the love of the world’s most beautiful woman, Helen of Sparta. Van Mieris depicts the critical moment of the tale when Paris, swayed by the temptations of Love, hands the Golden Apple to Venus while the other goddesses sit aggrieved nearby. The present composition was based on a drawing made by Van Mieris in 1692, which was recently sold in these rooms in 2007.
This meticulously detailed work, dated 1705, is a beautiful example of Van Mieris’s mature style and his subtle mastery in painting idyllic mythological subjects. The picture shows the famous judgement of Paris, initially derived from Homer’s Iliad and a perennially popular subject for artists from the early 16th century onwards and, indeed, one which Van Mieris himself returned to a number of times. At the wedding feast of the Greek hero Peleus and his bride, the nymph Thetis, the snubbed goddess of Discord, Eris, had cast a golden apple among the guests as a ‘prize’ for the most beautiful, to which Juno, Minerva and Venus all laid vehement claim. Zeus, declining to judge, ruled that the Trojan prince, Paris, should decide the winner. Each goddess famously promised the prince a tantalising prize: Juno offered to make him king of Europe and Asia; Minerva to give him wisdom and military prowess; and Venus offered him the love of the world’s most beautiful woman, Helen of Sparta. Van Mieris depicts the critical moment of the tale when Paris, swayed by the temptations of Love, hands the Golden Apple to Venus while the other goddesses sit aggrieved nearby. The present composition was based on a drawing made by Van Mieris in 1692, which was recently sold in these rooms in 2007.