Workshop of Michiel Jansz. van Mierevelt

In Delft in the early 1600s you could order a portrait from Michiel van Mierevelt much as you ordered cloth, by size and by grade. A head-and-shoulders likeness painted from life had its price. A copy of a portrait already in the studio, made by his assistants, cost roughly half as much. Pictures of that second kind are what a museum means by "workshop of Mierevelt".

Mierevelt, portrait painter to the princes of Orange, usually kept three or four trained assistants at work. Famous faces, the princes themselves or the commanders of the long war with Spain, were copied again and again in standard sizes for town halls, palaces and private houses, and the copies can be hard to tell from the master's own hand. Specialists still sort them panel by panel.

The studio was also a family business. His sons Jan and Pieter painted there until both died young. His daughter Geertgen married the engraver Willem Jacobsz. Delff, who turned the portraits into prints, and their son Jacob Delff trained in the studio and later took it over.