Willem van Mieris

In May 1718 a Hague nobleman, Johan Hendrik van Wassenaer Obdam, bought a small panel of a grocer's shop straight from Willem van Mieris in Leiden. Painted the year before and barely half a metre tall, it is the kind of picture Leiden's fine painters, the fijnschilders, were known for, minutely finished and meant to be looked at up close. It later entered the collection of Prince William V, was confiscated by the French in 1795 and sent to the Louvre, came back in 1815, and has hung in the Mauritshuis in The Hague since 1822.

Willem learned that polish from his father, Frans van Mieris the Elder, one of the most admired and best paid of the Leiden fine painters. When Frans died in 1681, Willem, aged 19, took over the family workshop. In 1694 he founded a drawing academy in Leiden with the painters Jacob van Toorenvliet and Carel de Moor, and ran it with de Moor for decades. His most loyal client, the Leiden collector Pieter de la Court van der Voort, ordered at least 28 paintings from him.

Around 1736 his eyesight failed and he gave up painting. He died in Leiden in 1747. His son and pupil, Frans van Mieris the Younger, painted genre scenes too and also wrote on the history of Leiden.