G. Wolff after Frans Mieris. Frans Mieris in seiner Werkstatt

Gower begins his account of Frans van Mieris (1635-1681) by saying he was “the best pupil” of Gerard Dou of Leiden, whom van Mieris rivaled by 1665, when only thirty years old. Soon “the most popular painter of genre in Holland,” van Mieris became,  according to Gower, “essentially a prince’s painter; he loved to represent silks and satins, velvets and brocades, massive plate and rich jewels”—all this in spite of being a boon companion of Jan Steen, at whose Leiden tavern van Mieris became so habitually besotted that he was once famously rescued from a sewer he had stumbled into (73-75). 

Melville had a more detailed and nuanced account of the life and career of van Mieris in his copy of The Works of Eminent Masters. Its 16-page essay was illustrated with nine engravings after a wide variety of the painter’s subjects, beginning with a portrait of the painter himself (fig. 1). Two of the engravings reproduced the two van Mieris paintings that Melville was to collect as free-standing prints: Franz Mieris in his Studio and The Writing-Master, also known as The Philosopher (I: 144, 133). The text of the essay compares paintings by van Mieris with those of Dou, Metsu, Netscher, and ter Borch, and it also provides considerable detail about this painter’s excessive drinking and spending. Melville marked a passage in which van Mieris, in prison for debt, “urged” by friends to “paint something that would procure his release,” replied that “the sight of the bar and the sound of the bolts rendered the imagination sterile” (1:134). 

The two van Mieris prints that Melville acquired came from early in the painter’s career, when he was still anchored more in the world of Holland’s rising middle class than in that of Gower’s princes. Each painting dates from the mid-1650s, when the young artist was still strongly influenced by both Dou and van Ostade, each twenty years his senior. Otto Naumann, who resurrected van Mieris’s modern reputation in 1981, suggested the young painter could have been “no older than twenty” when he depicted himself in Mieris in his Studio. He therefore dates the painting to c. 1655, suggesting that “Van Ostade was perhaps emulating van Mieris’s early interiors when he painted his Artist in his Studio in 1663” (1: 44; our CAT 204). Each studio painting was to become a prize possession of the Dresden State Gallery (Gower, 87, 113). Together, the prints Melville collected after each painting gave him an excellent opportunity to compare and contrast the subjects and styles of van Ostade and van Mieris. 

Each painting views the artist’s studio from a similar perspective. Natural light enters each studio through a leaded window from the left. Ostade is actively painting, hunched over and seen from behind, whereas van Mieris is fully visible to the viewer as he speaks to the model whose face he has already painted on the canvas. Van Ostade’s clothing appears to be entirely pragmatic, allowing ease of access to the canvas, whereas van Mieris’s dress is entirely social, from the ruffles surrounding his languid wrist down to the decorative bow on the shoe of the extended foot. Each painting includes active servants in the background, the two in van Ostade’s studio bending over to grind the paint, the one in van Mieris’s studio entering elegantly with a tray of refreshments for the painter and his subject. The engraving in Melville’s copy of Works closely resembles his free-standing lithograph of the same painting, with the exception that the Works version includes the full curve at the top of the canvas echoing the window-niche effect popularized by Dou (fig. 2).  

Perhaps the greatest difference between the book illustration and the free-standing print is that the engraving in Works is accompanied by considerable textual commentary. That commentary calls more attention to the sartorial, rather than the pictorial, quality of the painting itself. The friendly narrator explains that “we find” van Mieris “in his studio conversing with a handsome girl, of whom we, however, see nothing but her back, who has come to sit for her portrait, but her face appears on the canvas as in a mirror. Both the painter and the model are dressed with a richness and coquettishness.” Van Mieris is himself “dressed in black velvet, with tight silk breeches of bright blue, fastened below the knees with garters ornamented by rosettes, and ribbon shoe ties. Nothing could be more elegant or recherché than his appearance” (1: 133). The refined elegance with which van Mieris depicts himself and his model contrasts sharply with the stark pragmatism of van Ostade’s Artist in his Studio. So does the conspicuous presence of the viola de gamba to the left of the painter and the entry of the servant bringing refreshments on the right, quite a contrast to the servants who are grinding paint in van Ostade’s studio. 

Reading in the Works essay about the color and texture van Mieris had given to his “black velvet” gown, as well as to his “tight silk breeches of bright blue,” would have helped Melville imagine those elements of the original painting that could not be seen in the black and white tonalities of either the lithograph by Wolff or the illustration in the Works volume. That essay also helps readers today to imagine those same elements because the painting itself was destroyed in 1945 by Allied bombing in World War II. The Dresden State Museum of the 19th century has evolved into the Gemäldegalerie of the Dresden’s Semper Museum in the 21st century, but its current website has no color image of van Mieris’s colorful painting, which is necessarily represented by a black-and-white photograph taken before its destruction (fig. 3). The lithograph from Melville’s print collection and the engraving in his copy of Works give us a more satisfying image of the texture and quality of the original painting than the black and white photo on the Museum’s website today. The 20th century photograph does convey one element of the original 16th-century painting better than either of the 19th engravings: the white satin sheen of the dress of the model we see from behind.  

The creator of Melville’s personal copy of Franz Mieris in seiner Werkstatt would would appear to be Gustav Wolff, a portraitist and lithographer who studied at the Dresden Academy in the early 1820s. He created lithographic portraits of authors and artists in the 1830s and 1840s, when the original painting by Mieris was still a prize possession of the Dresden State Museum. One wonders if Wolff’s lithograph of van Mieris in his studio (after the early 1820s) and Ekeman-Allesson’s lithograph of van Ostade in his studio (before 1828) had been created for the same publication. Otto Naumann in 1981 does not include the Wolff lithograph in his list of nineteenth-century engravings of Mieris in his Studio. He does list an engraving by F. A. Joerdens (2: 20-21), the one image Gower had used to illustrate the chapter on van Mieris in Melville’s copy of The Works of Eminent Masters (fig. 4). 

Having three different engravings of the same painting in his own home—Wolff’s lithographic print, perhaps from the 1820s; the engraving in Works, published in 1854; and the engraving in Gower, published in 1880—gave Melville an excellent opportunity to compare engraving techniques, size of image, quality of paper, density of ink, and cropping of images in addition to such aesthetic issues as the representation of light and shadow, the sense of depth and space, the texture of fabrics, even the presence or absence of emotion in a living or painted face (you can examine these elements more closely through the Zoom function reached by clicking the image on our site). Such comparisons reveal the degree to which the engraving of a figure painting requires psychological insight as well as technical finesse, making the resulting image into a social construction as well as a pictorial reproduction. During the last twenty years of Melville’s life, insights such as these that emerged from his book and print collections could be tested against, and enriched by, Old Master paintings on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well by contemporary imports being exhibited at galleries just a few blocks from his 26th Street home.  

“In the seventeenth century,” as Quentin Buvelot has noted, both van Mieris and his master Gerard Dou “were hailed as supreme masters, both within the northern Netherlands and farther afield.” Their high reputation lasted until “the latter half of the nineteenth century,” when their paintings “gradually fell from favor.” The work of van Mieris was then little studied until “the fully illustrated monograph by the American art historian Otto Naumann in 1981, exactly three centuries after the artist’s death.” Naumann’s work “reestablished” van Mieris “to the position he deserves in art historical literature, and his work consequently appeared in major exhibitions at home and abroad” (12-13).  Buvelot’s 2005 catalog of the complete paintings (which accompanied a major exhibition at the Maurithuis in the Hague and the National Gallery in Washington, D. C.) confirmed the return of van Mieris to an honored place in the Golden Age of Dutch art.  Unfortunately, the destruction of Mieris in his Studio by bombing in 1945 deprived that painting from playing an active role in the resurrection of its painter’s reputation.