Willem van Mieris

This drawing, delicately executed on precious vellum and probably made on commission, reproduces two small ivory sculptures from a wealthy collector’s cabinet. Willem van Mieris handled the chalk sparely and with painstaking care, minimizing linear marks and relying on stumping to describe the round forms and smooth surfaces of the ivory models. Drawing after sculpture was an important part of Van Mieris’s practice. The drawing academy he co-founded in Leiden had a cabinet filled with plaster casts of antique statues and parts of the human body, which his students were encouraged to sketch.

Willem van Mieris, son of the renowned Dutch genre painter Frans van Mieris, belonged to a group of painters in Leiden known as the fijnschilders ("fine painters"), famous for their detailed and exquisite work. In addition to making paintings that continued the style of his father, Willem van Mieris also produced a number of virtuoso drawings based on contemporary sculpture that he collected. Venus and Cupid is from a series of drawings Van Mieris made after sculptures by Franciscus van Bossuit (1635-1692), a Flemish ivory carver who lived in Amsterdam during the last eight years of his life. Of the 13 drawings in the series, 12 faithfully reproduce casts after Van Bossuit's sculptures. Venus and Cupid is the exception. In this work, Van Mieris combined two separate sculptures by Van Bossuit to create a new subject. Venus and the dolphin are taken from Van Bossuit's sculpture of the sea nymph Galatea, while the Cupid breaking his bow is borrowed from Van Bossuit's Amor. With the addition of Cupid, Galatea becomes Venus, the Roman goddess of love. The source for the poses of both Venus and Galatea is, undoubtedly, the famous Medici Venus, a revered classical Roman sculpture. Working with painstaking care in black chalk on parchment, Van Mieris proudly signed his drawing on the back, intending it to be a precious collector's item equal in value and quality to the fine ivory carvings he copied.