Frans van Mieris the Elder, 'Portrait of the Artist's Wife, Cunera van der Cock', about 1657-8

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, and although Cunera appears in about a quarter of them, very few are actual portraits of her. The rest are genre pictures or tronies (character studies) in which she is playing a role. He features her long, straight nose, pouting lips and small chin, but the moods of the pictures and the characters she plays differ greatly, from the playful Lady in a Red Jacket Feeding a Parrot to the frankly erotic The Oyster Meal, which includes a self portrait that’s unflattering and intended to be comic.

This portrait is one of the more serious views of Cunera. She was about 27 years old and had already given birth to their first son, Willem, when it was painted. Seen in profile with her head turned back slightly towards us, she gazes into the distance, her expression perhaps a little wistful. She wears a long, white coif and her clothes appear unassuming and plain. But the jacket into which her white shift is tucked is expensive, made of dark red velvet and white fur, and the hem of the coif is embroidered with fine gold thread. There’s just enough restrained but costly decoration to suggest that the family is prosperous; van Mieris was already becoming one of the most successful artists in Leiden, the town in which they lived.

Cunera hides her hair, immaculately combed back under the white coif to reveal her high forehead and arched eyebrows. Van Mieris portrays her as the perfect, modest wife. With almost invisible brushstrokes, he makes her skin glow, soft and almost tangible. He allows one fine tendril of hair to escape the coif to wave down in the shadow on her cheek, and shows the fur reaching up her jacket to rest on her breast.

The picture was originally oval in shape and thought to be painted on vellum (made from calfskin and unusual as a picture support at this time). At some point around the end of the eighteenth century, it was put onto an oak panel to become the small rectangle that exists now. At the same time, an artist less skilled than van Mieris painted over the background. Presumably it was this same artist that lengthened the sleeve and the fur cuff, making the sleeve three-quarter length, a fashion that came in some years after the portrait was painted. Again, the brushstrokes are far less accomplished than van Mieris’s.

Celebrating a wedding or other important event with a pair of portraits was traditional in the seventeenth century. There is a self portrait of van Mieris that is thought to be a pair with this picture (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin), perhaps painted to celebrate Willem’s birth. It’s also an oval and probably on vellum with no later additions. A pupil of Gerrit Dou, who called him ‘Prince of my Pupils', van Mieris belonged to the fijnschilders – fine painters famous for their flawless finish and precise attention to detail – in his native Leiden.