Frans Jansz. van Mieris was born in Leiden, where he was taught by Abraham van den Tempel and Gerrit Dou. He worked in Leiden, where he died. He was a genre painter.
Frans van Mieris the Elder
1635 - 1681
Image: Detail from Frans van Mieris the Elder, Self Portrait of the Artist, with a Cittern, 1674
Paintings by Frans van Mieris the Elder
A young woman sits, one delicate hand outstretched and holding an almond to feed to a parrot. On one finger she has a thimble – she has stopped sewing to feed the bird, an African Grey that hunches over, assessing her gift with a beady eye. The model used for the young woman is thought to be Cune...
Not on display
Cunera van der Cock married the artist Frans van Mieris about a year before he painted this portrait of her. About 120 of his pictures still exist, but although Cunera appears in about a quarter of them, very few are actual portraits of her. The rest are genre paintings in which she is playing a...
Not on display
Frans van Mieris painted this tiny self portrait three days before he turned 39 in 1674. By this time, he was highly successful. His work was bought, sometimes for vast sums, by nobility from abroad, including the Medici, the ruling family of Florence. Perhaps for this reason, van Mieris chose to...
Not on display
An old man sits in a window, a glass in his hand, a pile of plump, pink shrimps on the table in front of him. Vine leaves hang down overhead, and on the windowsill is a violin. Carved into the wooden panel beneath the sill are the Latin letters for 1660, ‘MDCLX’ – the year the original picture wa...
Not on display