Willem van Mieris’s bright and vivacious Portrait of a Woman with an Overtoom exudes luxury. The sitter’s sumptuous clothing, accessories, and furnishings, all rendered with the artist’s refined painting technique, convey her wealth and social standing. She gazes directly at the viewer, her expression animated by a slight smile. The woman’s ensemble consists of a shimmering burnt-orange dress over a lace-trimmed blouse, belted with a red sash and worn with a fringed blue silk shawl that she lightly caresses. Her elongated neck and high forehead draw attention to a perfectly curled coiffure enhanced by lavish white ostrich feathers. She sits in an elegant interior demarcated by a voluminous red velvet drapery, resting her right elbow on a table overlaid by a colorful Persian-style textile. The classically infused architecture features engaged columns, a hint of ornamentation carved in relief, and an open archway with a landscape beyond. Van Mieris signed and dated the painting at top center, just beneath the ionic pilaster’s capital.
Van Mieris found great success creating portraits of wealthy patrons in his hometown of Leiden. Trained by his father, Frans van Mieris the Elder (1635–81), Willem held prominent roles in the city’s artists’ organizations and belonged to an affluent social circle, which, combined with his keen understanding of this milieu’s preferences and priorities, led to a steady stream of commissions.1
In his portraiture, he often relied on tried-and-true formulas, returning repeatedly to specific compositional types and color combinations. Many of these harken back to earlier works that Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641) and Pieter Lely (1618–80) made for the English court, aspects of which later portraitists working in the northern Netherlands, such as Caspar Netscher (ca. 1639–84), adopted for sitters originating from a wider swath of Dutch society.2 The vivid color scheme in Portrait of a Woman with an Overtoom—consisting of a bronze silk dress, red sash and curtain, and blue shawl, all echoed in the draped table covering—is one Van Mieris used frequently, including in earlier and later works. Examples in The Leiden Collection include Diana, Goddess of the Hunt of 1686 and Portrait of Dina Margareta de Bye of 1705 (fig 1). The latter painting shows a particular similarity to Portrait of a Woman with an Overtoom: the women in these two paintings both display graceful anatomy and stylized gestures evocative of classical sculpture.3
Van Mieris’s use of pictorial conventions did not prevent him from evolving his imagery to meet the changing tastes of his patrons. As French fashion and decor gained popularity among the Dutch elite in the late 1600s, he increasingly incorporated intricate hairstyles and flamboyant, revealing garments into his portraiture.4 This artistic adaptability served him well: even in a contracting art market, Van Mieris continued to attract prosperous clients willing to pay substantial sums for his work.5
The patron who commissioned this showy portrait—likely the sitter, her husband, or a family member—would certainly have admired Van Mieris’s masterful depiction of the varied textures of the expensive fabrics that the artist clearly relished painting. Particularly striking is the contrast between the heavy folds of the red velvet curtain, punctuated by a large dangling tassel, and the supple silks of the sitter’s dress and the lively fringe of her shawl. Leiden was a center of textile production and trade, and Van Mieris knew that his patrons paid special attention to how he rendered fabrics in his paintings.6 This industry served as an important engine to the art market. It provided income for many of the city’s wealthiest inhabitants, who in turn bought and commissioned paintings.7
Throughout his career, Van Mieris successfully courted clients with ties to the textile industry. In 1683, the year after he joined the Guild of Saint Luke, he painted a portrait of Samuel Van Acker (now in The Leiden Collection), a merchant of the woolen textile grein, handling bolts of cloth. Other major patrons included Petronella de la Court (1624–1707), whose husband was the silk merchant Adam Oortmans (1622–84), as well as De la Court’s cousin, the fantastically wealthy cloth manufacturer Pieter de la Court van der Voort (1664–1739).8
In addition to rich fabrics, Van Mieris also depicted numerous foreign luxury items in his Portrait of a Woman with an Overtoom, underscoring both his painterly skill and the sitter’s wealth. Trimming her blouse is voluminous gros point lace, a type that originated in Venice.9 To create its distinctive floral pattern, Van Mieris used creamy, curved strokes of the brush, bordered by dots of paint to lend the lace a dynamic three-dimensionality. On the table lies an Isfahan-style carpet, a type of table covering that also appears in paintings by the artist’s father, including The Death of Lucretia, evoking coveted textiles imported from Persia.10 Here, Willem’s carpet is striking for its detail. He used short strokes of pigment and minute white highlights to mimic the carpet’s spiky pile, creating a textural contrast to the smooth silks and ruffled lace worn by his subject. Also vying for the viewer’s attention are the pinpricks of light reflecting off the hard sheen of her pearl necklace, made from expensive jewels harvested in the Indian Ocean and brought to the Netherlands by the Dutch East India Company, and the soft plumes of large white ostrich feathers, which first came to Europe via trade with sub-Saharan Africa.11
Housewives obsessed with buying foreign luxury goods to display within the home were at times the subject of satire, as in Hieronymus Sweerts’s novel De tien vermakelijkheden des huwelijk, or The Ten Pleasures of Marriage (Amsterdam, 1678). Yet, as Judith Noorman observes, there was some truth to this stereotype, given that the responsibility for home decor largely fell to women, some of whom saw it as a means “to raise the social and professional status of their families.”12 This dynamic is almost certainly at play here, with Van Mieris furthering such aspirations by portraying his subject in her well-appointed (or idealized) home, presumably as directed by the sitter or a loved one who commissioned the portrait.
Visible through the archway at right is a landscape with a quaint Dutch village featuring a church steeple and low-slung, modest buildings. Van Mieris painted this background in a muted palette of brown, green, and gray, with just a hint of pale blue sky. The handling is also quite loose, with the leaves of the trees indicated by smudges of paint, a far cry from the meticulous brushwork of the women’s luxurious clothing and elegant furnishings.
Particularly distinctive is the hand-turned wooden overtoom (fig 2) on a small hill before the church. This device was designed to haul boats across land from one waterway to another. Such rolling bridges existed in the northern Netherlands as early as 1200.13 While the generalized forms of this overtoom and the nearby buildings preclude identifying a specific location, small portages like this one were constructed throughout the Netherlands, including around Leiden. Van Mieris may have loosely based his depiction of an overtoom on prints by such artists as Reinier Nooms (ca. 1623–64), whose The Overtoom (fig 3) dates from around 1652–54. He may also have consulted compendia of waterworks like those designed by Cornelis Meijer (1629–1701), published in the last quarter of the seventeenth century.14
By depicting an overtoom and unassuming village, Van Meiris departed from the type of background motif he typically included in his portraits of women. Usually he favored idealized, often classicized elements, such as the fountain with putto and mountainous landscape with cypress trees in Portrait of Dina Margareta de Bye (fig 1), or the stone relief of Venus in his 1692 portrait of Sara Maria van der Marck tot Leur (d. 1699) (fig 4), whose physiognomy and pose resemble the sitter’s in the present painting.15 This departure from convention suggests that the overtoom had significance for the sitter and patron—perhaps evoking a noteworthy locale or ties to a family business.16
A pendant depicting the woman’s husband may have accompanied A Portrait of a Woman with an Overtoom, a supposition supported by the angle of the figure’s legs, as though turned toward a companion.17 Van Mieris and his father both created pendants or dual portraits that included inventive interplays between couples. In The Leiden Collection are Frans van Mieris the Elder’s Portrait of a Thirty-Year-Old Man and Portrait of a Twenty-Five-Year-Old Woman in which the man stands beside a statue of Venus, goddess of love, while the woman, who pushes aside her apron perhaps in an allusion to pregnancy, is accompanied by a sculpture of Cupid.18 A pendant to the present work may have included an element related to the overtoom, much as Willem Van Mieris’s portrait of Jacob van Wassanaer from around 1690–1700 shows the sitter with papers on his table that relate to his role of dijkgraaf, or dike warden (fig 5).19
The combination of motifs in this portrait would have held particular appeal for a decidedly local audience. Such viewers would appreciate seeing the rich textiles and other luxuries alongside a mechanical device indicative of business acumen, which together project a strong message of prosperity. This carefully crafted juxtaposition affirms the prominent place both artist and patron sought to establish for this individual, among her peers as well as in her environs.