Lairesse / van Mieris / Houbraken

After Lairesse’s career as a painter and engraver was ended by the onset of blindness in 1690, his subsequent career as a lecturer and as author of The Art of Painting (Het Groot Schilderboek) greatly strengthened the influence of the neo-classicism he had brought to Dutch painting. One of his painting students had been Willem van Mieris, son of Frans van Mieris. Willem, mastering his father’s realistic genre style, had moved on to exactly the kind of historical, mythological, and allegorical subjects that Lairesse was to call for in his pictorial treatise. Young Willem’s direct tutelage with Lairesse had not lasted long, however, as Melville would have read in his copy of Works. The same essay in which Melville marked the passage about Frans van Mieris being locked in debtor’s prison because of his habitual drinking with Jan Steen explained that van Mieris himself detested the vice in others. Gerard Lairesse, so “grave and solemn in his books, was a bit of a libertine in his manners, and for this reason Mieris removed his son from his care, lest his example should corrupt the youth’s morals” (I: 131, 134).

Lairesse expressed mixed opinions about the senior Mieris in his treatise, declaring on the one hand that Frans van Mieris was never successful in moving from small paintings to large ones, but also warning “aspiring painters that it is ‘more commendable, to be like a good Mieris in the modern manner than a bad Raphael in the antique” (Naumann 1: 41). In 1709, soon after Lairesse published his treatise, Willem van Mieris completed a work which took Lairesse’s classicisizing theories about as far as they could go, this being one of at least two paintings in which he depicted Tasso’s Rinaldo and Armida as chunky German burghers in a pastoral landscape surrounded by classical cherubs (fig. 6).

CAT 213 fig 6 willem van mieris Armida binding the sleeping Rinaldo with Flowers Mauritshuis.jpg

Figure 6. Willem van Mieris. Armida binding the Sleeping Rinaldo with Flowers, oil on canvas, 1709. Maritshuis, the Hague.

One final twist to the position of Lairesse in Melville’s art collection. The first biographer of Lairesse himself (and of many of the Dutch painters who preceded him) was Arnold Houbraken in his De groote Schouburgh der Nederlantsche Konstschilders en Schilderessen of 1718-21. Arnold Houbraken (1660-1719) had been assisted for years in this biographic survey of Dutch painting by his son Jacob (1698-1780), who completed the final volume of the three-volume Groote Schouburgh after his father’s death. Arnold and Jacob are the Houbrakens who collaborated with the Hoets and Bernard Pickart in the three-volume Taferelen that was published in the Hague in 1728, twenty-five of whose richly illustrated capital letter woodcuts eventually ended up in that small envelope from Snedecors in Melville’s collection (CAT 24-49). Melville marked a passage about Arnold Houbraken’s son Jacob (known as James in English) in the essay on Adriaen Brouwer in his copy of Works. He drew long lines along both margins of the paragraph that begins with this intriguing sentence: “James Houbraken, who ably engraved the portraits which illustrate his father’s ‘Lives of the Painters,’ conceived the idea of placing a monkey beside Brauwer’s portrait to express that buffoon humor which, far from diminishing as age advanced, in Brauwer’s case only increased and became more repulsive” (fig. 7).

CAT 213 fig 7 deatil brouwer in works 1 147 from harvard_Page_3 - Copy.jpg

Figure 7. Melville marks paragraph on James Houbraken in essay on Adriaen Brouwer in his copy of The Works of Eminent Masters, 1:147 (detail). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

In an engraving for the early pages of his father’s Groote Schouburgh, Jacob Houbraken included that same monkey a double portrait of Frans van Mieris and Jan Steen (fig. 8):

CAT 213 fig 8 jacob houbraken after Frans van Mieris double portrait FM and AB or JS.jpg

Figure 8. Jacob Houbraken’s triple portrait Frans van Mieris, Jan Steen, and a monkey in his father’s De Groote Schouburgh. In Horn and van Leeuwen, eds. Houbraken Translated. 3:6.

In 1742 three generations of the Van Mieris family were famously represented in a triple portrait by Frans van Mieris III, son of Willem, in which young Frans and his father Willem are pointing to the page in Arnold Houbraken’s Groote Schouburgh in which Houbraken’s son Jacob had engraved the portrait of Frans van Mieris, father of the one, grandfather of the other (Buvelot 25-28), complex associations showing how closely the figure painters of the Dutch Golden age of the 1660s in Melville’s print collection were related to the engravers of the capital letter engravings he acquired from the 1728 Taferelen.

The 1721 Groote Schouburgh by Arnold (and Jacob) Houbraken was the source for much of the information about painters such as van Ostade, Teniers, van Mieris, Metsu, Netscher, Steen, and Brouwer to which Melville had access to in Works not only when collecting his prints but when writing “At the Hostelry.” That poem, as well as his understanding of his own collection, would have been much impoverished without it. Arnold Houbraken’s reputation, like that of many of the Dutch painters whose lives he chronicled, suffered a sharp decline in the latter half of the nineteenth century, from which it has recently recovered in tandem with a renewed appreciation of those artists themselves. Buvelot, for example, finds that Houbraken was “remarkably well informed” about Frans van Mieris, who died exactly forty years before the Groote Schouburgh was published (13-14).