Woman Holding
LandscapeaJan van Mieris(Leiden 1660 – 1690 Rome)

Doginaca. 1683–85
oil on panel
27 x 20.7 cm
JM-100© 2017 The Leiden Collection

Woman Holding a Dog in a Landscape
Page 2 of 7

How To Cite
Aono, Junko. "Woman Holding a Dog in a Landscape." In The Leiden Collection Catalogue. Edited byArthur K. Wheelock Jr. New York, 2017.
https://www.theleidencollection.com/archive/.
This page is available on the site's Archive. PDF of every version of this page is available on the Archive,
and the Archive is managed by a permanent URL. Archival copies will never be deleted. New versions areadded only when a substantive change to the narrative occurs.

© 2017 The Leiden Collection

Woman Holding a Dog in a Landscape
Page 3 of 7

An elegantly dressed woman stands in a dimly lit wooded landscapeComparative Figuresbeneath a rose-colored evening sky. She gently embraces her lap dog
while, with her right hand, gracefully fingering the thin, taupe scarf
wrapped loosely around the low neckline of her dark, shimmering dress.[1]As she gazes toward the left, her young face is partly shaded by her stylish
red velvet beret, the lustrous, soft texture and subtle sheen of which theartist has rendered with special care.
This picture was formerly attributed to Jan’s father, Frans van Mieris theElder (1635–81), whose later work displays similarly strong chiaroscuro
effects and robust highlights.[2] Jan van Mieris, who was apprenticed to hisfather along with his brother Willem, produced a number of genre picturesin his father’s manner during the early 1680s that are stylistically related tothe present work.[3] A similar woman, for example, appears in A Woman

Fig 1. Jan van Mieris, A Woman
Reading a Letter and Men
Playing Tric-Trac beneath aPortico, 1680, oil on canvas, 77.5
x 67.4 cm, Sarah Campbell
Blaffer Foundation, Houston, acc.
no. 1977.10

Reading a Letter and Men Playing Tric-Trac beneath a Portico (fig 1) andTraining the Little Dog (ca. 1680).[4] In each of these paintings, she strikes
a comparable pose, with a frontal view of her upper body and her headturned to the right as she gazes somewhat downward, and she even holds
her dog in an analogous manner. Particularly in the latter picture, thewoman’s dress and the rendering of highlights are remarkably similar.
Woman Holding a Dog in a Landscape was probably painted a few years
later, when Jan van Mieris began to focus on single figures in the open air,as in, for example, his Smoking Man, dated 1685.[5] In this painting hesimilarly situated his sitter before a wooded landscape with dimly lit trees
silhouetting the evening sky.
The elegant manner in which the woman holds her scarf and her little dog
reveals Van Mieris’s interest in classicism at this stage of his career.
According to Van Gool, Frans the Elder initially considered sending Jan toAmsterdam to learn from Gerard de Lairesse (1640–1711), the leadingclassicist painter and art theorist, though ultimately he changed his mind.[6]Although Jan never did study with Lairesse, he probably became involvedin the circle of Amsterdam artists and art devotees who sympathized with
Lairesse’s principles. Jan’s allegory, Minerva as Patron of the Arts , dated
1685, was in fact inspired by Lairesse’s prominent series of five allegories
in grisaille the artist painted for the textile magnate Philips de Flines, wholived on the Herengracht in Amsterdam.[7]As he stated in his Groot schilderboek (1707), Lairesse believed that© 2017 The Leiden Collection

Woman Holding a Dog in a Landscape
Page 4 of 7classical form and beauty were essential not only for history painting but
also for the representation of everyday life. He wrote: “gracefulness,”which consists of the ideal form and proper proportions of the human bodyelevated in ancient sculptures, “must indispensably be perceived inmodern representations.”[8] Whether this gracefulness was successfully
incorporated into the female figure in the picture or not,[9] Jan van Mieris
became increasingly keen to learn directly from works by ancient andmodern artists in Italy, and he departed for that country in 1688.
Unfortunately, he soon fell ill and died at the age of thirty, just a few years
after he arrived in Rome.
-Junko Aono

© 2017 The Leiden Collection

Woman Holding a Dog in a Landscape
Page 5 of 7Endnotes
1. The fashionably dressed figure, presented knee-length in a landscape, could be considereda portrait. But the vague depiction of the woman’s face, which is further obscured under theshadow of the beret, does not substantiate this interpretation.
2. For instance, see Death of Lucretia, dated 1679 (FM-103), or The Letter Writer, dated 1680,Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
3. For Jan’s genre pictures made around the early 1680s, see the entry on another picture bythis painter in the Leiden Collection, JM-101.
4. Present location now unknown. For A Woman Reading a Letter and Men Playing Tric-Trac
beneath a Portico, see Otto Naumann, Frans van Mieris (1635–1681) the Elder , 2 vols.
(Doornspijk, 1981), 1: fig. 129; 2:130, no. B7; Peter Sutton, ed.,Love Letters: Dutch Genre
Painting in the Age of Vermeer (Exh. cat. Greenwich, Conn., Bruce Museum; Dublin,
National Gallery of Ireland) (London, 2003), 200–2, no. 43. Naumann later suggested thatJan would have been capable of executing this picture almost entirely by himself. For
Training the Little Dog, see also the entry on JM-101 and sale, Charpentier, Paris, 6 April
1957, no. 1.
5. The date of the current picture is suggested by Margreet van der Hut, who is researching amonograph on Jan van Mieris. I am grateful to her for offering me some unpublishedinformation on this artist. A Smoking Man (oil on panel, 19 x 14 cm, Stiftung Kunsthaus
Heylshof, Worms) is one of the paintings by Jan van Mieris that was owned by Pieter de la
Court van der Voort, the famous Leiden collector and patron of Willem van Mieris; see T. H.
Lunsingh Scheurleer, ed., Het Rapenburg: Geschiedenis van een Leidse gracht , 6 vols. andindex (Leiden, 1986–92), 6:479.
6. Johan van Gool, De nieuwe schouburg der Nederlantsche kunstschilders en schilderessen ,2 vols. (The Hague, 1750–51), 2:443.
7. Alain Roy, Gérard de Lairesse, 1640–1711 (Paris, 1992), 303–6, nos. P. 143–47; Ekkehard
Mai, Sander Paarlberg, and Gregor J. M. Weber, eds., De Kroon op het Werk: Hollandse
schilderkunst 1670–1750 (Exh. cat. Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum; Dordrecht,Dordrechts Museum; Kassel, Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel) (Cologne, 2006), 200–1,no. 47. Lairesse painted these works between 1675 and 1683.
8. “De bevalligheid moet noodzakelyk in Moderne Verbeeldingen waargenomen worden.”
Gerard de Lairesse, Het Groot Schilderboek, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1707), 1:177. For
Lairesse’s instructions on adapting important qualities of history painting to genre pictures,
see Junko Aono, “Ennobling Daily Life: A Question of Refinement in Early EighteenthCentury Dutch Genre Painting,” Simiolus 33, no. 4 (2007/8): 240–43; and JunkoAono, Confronting the Golden Age: Imitation and Innovation in Dutch Genre Painting© 2017 The Leiden Collection

Woman Holding a Dog in a Landscape
Page 6 of 7

1680-1750 (Amsterdam, 2015), 101-3.
9. Although the bend of the woman’s right arm seems far from natural in an anatomical sense,
this type of “curved” arm was what Jan van Mieris had initially learned from his father’s later
works, likely as a method to idealize or classicize ordinary people. For Otto Naumann’s
discussion on the “curved” elbow depicted by Frans van Mieris the Elder, see Otto
Naumann, “Frans van Mieris’ Personal Style,” in Frans van Mieris 1635–1681, ed. Quentin
Buvelot (Exh. cat. The Hague, Mauritshuis; Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art)
(Zwolle, 2005), 37–41.

ProvenancePossibly Jan Six (1618–1700), Amsterdam.
Possibly Schrödering, Hamburg.
Gottfried Winkler, Leipzig, by 1768, as by Frans van Mieris the Elder.
[Newhouse Galleries, New York].
Private collection, Southern California (sale, Sotheby’s, New York, 15 October 1987, no. 26[to a Midwest private collector], as by Frans van Mieris the Younger).
Private collection, United States (sale, Sotheby’s, New York, 8 June 2007, no. 203 [to JackKilgore & Co., Inc., New York]).
From whom acquired by the present owner in 2007.

References
Historische Erklärungen der Gemälde, welche Herr Gottfried Winkler in Leipzig gesammlet .
Leipzig, 1768, 175, no. 433, as by Frans van Mieris the Elder.
Hofstede de Groot, Cornelis. Beschreibendes und kritisches Verzeichnis der Werke derhervorragendsten höllandischen Maler des XVII. Jahrhunderts. 10 vols. Esslingen andParis, 1907–28, 10:87, no. 322, as by Frans van Mieris the Elder.
Naumann, Otto. Frans van Mieris (1635–1681) the Elder . 2 vols. Doornspijk, 1981,
2:134–35, no. B20, fig. CB20, as possibly by Frans van Mieris the Younger.

Technical Summary© 2017 The Leiden CollectionPowered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

Woman Holding a Dog in a Landscape
Page 7 of 7

The support, a single plank of vertically grained, rectangular oak, has bevels on all foursides.[1] The panel is unthinned and uncradled and has machine tool marks along the entire
reverse. There is a remnant of a red wax seal, a black stencil, white chalk, and a handwritten
inscription but no import stamps or panel maker’s marks.
A warm-colored ground has been thinly and evenly applied, and the paint has been applied insuccessive thin layers of transparent glazing. The contours of the figure’s flesh tones, red hat,drapery folds, white sleeve, and the white fur of the spaniel are slightly raised. The painting is ingood condition with areas of thinness through the figure’s skirt and the landscape.
No underdrawing or compositional changes are readily apparent in infrared images captured at
780–1000 nanometers or in the X-radiograph.
The painting is unsigned and undated.
The painting underwent minor conservation treatment in 2007 and remains in a good state ofpreservation.

Technical Summary Endnotes

1. The characterization of the wood is based on visual examination only.

© 2017 The Leiden Collection