(Leiden 1662–1747)
Portrait of a lady with a spaniel, possibly Dina Margareta de Bye (1680-1740), a landscape beyond,
oil on panel, 27.9 x 23 cm, framed

Provenance:
possibly collection of Willem Six (1662–1733), mayor of Amsterdam;
possibly his sale, Schoemaker and ten Brink, Amsterdam, 12 May 1734, lot 55 (as Willem Mieris, sold for f. 182);
Collection of Johan Adriaen Versijden van Varick (1713–1791), Lord of Zyll, Amsterdam;
his sale, Leiden, 29 October 1791, lot 44 (f 155 to Schalje?);
Collection of Abraham Dijkman (1711–1794), Amsterdam;
his sale, de Bosch and Yver, Amsterdam, 17 July 1794, lot 24;
sale, van der Schley, Roos a. o., Amsterdam, 21 June 1797, lot 133 (f 120 to Stevens);
Collection Adolf Peter Vischer-Boelger (1852–1929), Basel, by 1928 (according to literature);
sale, Pierre Bergé & Associates, Paris, 13 December 2002, lot 62 (as Willem van Mieris);
Private collection, France;
sale, Prunier, Louviers, 20 May 2018, lot 57 (as Willem van Mieris);
Private collection;
sale, Christie’s, New York, 29 October 2019, lot 737 (as Willem van Mieris);
Matarazzo di Licosa collection

Literature:
possibly G. Hoet, Catalogus of naamlyst van schilderyen met derzelver pryzen, I, The Hague 1752, p. 413, no. 55 (‘Een Vrouwtje met een Hondje, door Willem Mieris’);
C. Hofstede de Groot, Beschreibendes und kritisches Verzeichnis der Werke der hervorragendsten Holländischen Maler des XVII. Jahrhunderts, vol. 10, Stuttgart and Paris 1928, p. 186, no. 308 (as Willem van Mieris)

We are grateful to Fred Meijer for confirming the attribution on the basis of a photograph.

The present painting is registered in the RKD database under no. 1001636394 (as Attributed to Willem van Mieris).

This highly refined and finished portrait, executed by Willem van Mieris around the turn of the eighteenth century, represents a well-dressed woman standing behind a balustrade. She is handsomely attired in an orange and white tinged brown satin dress with an aqua-blue shawl draped across her body. She embraces a white and brown spaniel with her left arm, while she delicately takes a piece of bread with her fingertips.

The picture surface is rendered with a smooth, enamel-like finish, particularly in the woman’s skin. This adeptness in rendering realistic surfaces is further highlighted in the superbly naturalistic representation of the various soft materials such as the hair, draped wool of the carpet, and dog’s hair. The combination of a strong light and a virtuoso attention to detail defines the forms and differing textures within the scene with a level of verisimilitude for which the Leiden fijnschilders were much admired, even during their lifetime.

The sitter may well be Dina Margareta de Bye, the second daughter of the Leiden lawyer Johan Paeuw de Bye and his wife Anna van Oorthoorn, based on similarities in her facial features with those found in a securely identified portrait of her dated 1705 now held in The Leiden Collection, New York (inv. no. WM-102). Indeed, an estate inventory drawn up following de Bye’s death, lists three portraits by van Mieris, one of her deceased husband, Peter van der Dussen, and two of the de Bye herself, decorating a large room in her fashionable house on the Rapenburg in Leiden.

Willem van Mieris was the son of Frans van Mieris the Elder, the leading member of the family of artists working in Leiden. Leiden was the centre of the fijnschilder tradition of painting, developed by Gerard Dou, and practised by artists including Van Mieris, Gabriel Metsu and Godfried Schalcken. Fijnschilder - literally ‘fine painting’ - is the term that, in the nineteenth century, came to define these meticulously executed paintings with their exquisite details and smooth surfaces, typically painted on a small scale, with some features purportedly executed with brushes made from a single hair. Van Mieris’ elegant ladies have small heads and their bodies are modelled after the academic beauty ideal of the time.