page_title: Willem van Mieris
section_title: Pupils
hierarchical_section_title: Willem van Mieris / Patrons and legacy / Pupils
context_page_description: Willem van Mieris was an 18th-century painter from the Northern Netherlands.
context_section_description: Hieronymous van der Mij, born in 1687 in Leiden, was one of Willem van Mieris' pupils. Van der Mij painted mostly portraits, borrowing from van Mieris' style. His portraits were highly regarded because of how much they resembled the sitters, who were usually high status individuals including professors or regents of the armhouse.
  Willem van Mieris also took care of training his son Frans in the art of painting: when the old artist was forced to retire from active work due to his progressive blindness, he passed on his studio to his son, and the two consistently worked together. However, Frans van Mieris the Younger was not nearly as successful as his father and grandfather: only very few of his works are known to us, and he never managed to gain popularity among collectors. Some of his paintings were even refused by the commissioner, as happened with the German prince of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, who decided not to accept Frans's Diana bathing (executed in close collaboration with Willem) due to its poor quality. After these unsatisfactory results, Frans van Mieris the Younger soon quit painting to dedicate himself to antiquarian collections: he was a highly esteemed expert in numismatics, a field he wrote several renowned treatises on.
caption: Cimon and Iphigenia
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