Art Institute of Chicago
A Mother Feeding her Child (The Happy Mother)
Willem van Mieris (Dutch, 1662–1747)LinkedCulture matchlcp-a8ecb908f49e
- Date
- 1707
- Medium
- Oil on panel
- Culture
- Holland
- Department
- Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Institution
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Object ID
- 497
From the Art Institute of Chicago record
In this scene of domestic life, Willem van Mieris employed the highly finished, enamel-like technique known as fine painting to achieve a surface that shows no obvious traces of brushwork. While painters like Gerard ter Borch and Caspar Netscher reserved this time-consuming style for rare and expensive textiles like silk, Van Mieris applied it to more commonplace materials. Here, for instance, the artist deftly applied highlights to the cane bassinet and ceramic pitcher on the table with the tip of his brush.
The authoritative record is held by Art Institute of Chicago. LinkedCulture surfaces this object and its connections; it does not alter institutional metadata.
Get printable QR codesHide QR codes
Open QR codes for this object page and the museum record. They stay collapsed until needed.
Provenance & credit
As published by the source institution. Coverage varies — not every institution's open-data feed includes ownership history.
- Credit line
- Gift of Edson Keith
- Provenance
- David Grenier, Middleburg, until 1712; sold at auction, Middleburg, August 18, 1712, no. 73 for 32 florins [price given by Hoet 1752]. Jacques Clemens, canon of St. Bavo’s Cathedral, Ghent (died 1779); sold in his estate sale, Ghent, June 21, 1779, no. 170 for 457 florins to Rijsschoot [according to an annotated copy of the sale catalogue in the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, The Hague]. Emanuel-Augustin-Joseph van den Meersche, by 1791; sold in his sale, Salle de la Confrerie de St. George, Ghent, July 12, 1791, lot 103 for £335 to Rijschot [according to an annotated copy of the sale catalogue in Bibliothèque des Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels]. Countess Vilain XIV (died 1853), castle of Wetteren, by 1827 [according to the introduction of the catalogue of the May 2, 1857 sale of the collection of le Comte Philippe Vilain XIV]; at her death to her husband le Comte Philippe Vilain XIV (died 1856); sold in his sale, Pillet, Paris, May 2, 1857, no. 7 for 12,300 francs to the Marquis de Rhodes [price and buyer according to an annotated copy of the sale catalogue in the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, The Hague]. Presumably Prince Anatole Demidoff, Villa San Donato, near Florence (died 1870); by descent to his nephew Prince Paul Demidoff (died 1885) and later to Paul Demidoff’s widow Helena Troubetskoi, Pratolino, near Florence [according to an entry in William French’s 1889 travel notebook dated April 19, 1889, the painting was on view with the Demidoff collection in Pratolino, Art Institute archives]; included in the group of 13 paintings from the Demidoff collection sold to trustees of the Art Institute through Durand-Ruel, Paris in 1890; purchase price reimbursed by Edson Keith, 1890.
Linked open data
Authority identifiers that link this record into the wider web of cultural data — stable references you can follow to the source.
- Object type
- AAT300033618
Related across collections
Semantically similar works from Art Institute of Chicago and other institutions.