Frans van Mieris I, Dutch, 1635-1681: Head of a Woman Looking Downward, c. 1660-70 

This infor­mal but metic­u­lous­ly drawn sheet is a head or char­ac­ter study, a type of draw­ing cre­at­ed by the artist for poten­tial future use, or sim­ply made for prac­tice and later review. With her down­ward-look­ing glance, Van Mieris com­mu­ni­cat­ed a remark­ably intro­spec­tive aspect of this young wom­an’s face, fur­ther col­ored by what appears to be a slight self-con­scious­ness on the sit­ter’s part as she poses for the artist. Van Mieris achieved this pow­er­ful effect with only a small por­tion of her face vis­i­ble in pro­file. This pre­vi­ous­ly unpub­lished draw­ing only recent­ly emerged on the art mar­ket after near­ly a cen­tu­ry in pri­vate hands with­in the same fam­i­ly. Most of Van Mieris’s small oeu­vre of just over thir­ty accept­ed draw­ings are high­ly fin­ished works on vel­lum.1

A small­er por­tion are stud­ies for his paint­ings, which work up spe­cif­ic fig­ures for his com­po­si­tions.2

This sheet, on the other hand, is nei­ther a fin­ished work, nor does it relate to any known paint­ing, yet we know that the artist like­ly pro­duced a large num­ber of sim­i­lar stud­ies that are now lost. The major­i­ty of the draw­ings attrib­uted to him in eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry sale cat­a­logues were described, in fact, as fig­ure stud­ies or heads like this one.3

There is also men­tion of an orig­i­nal sketch­book by Van Mieris that appeared at auc­tion in 1800, the sheets of which were dis­persed some­time in the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry.4

The fate of many of almost all of these sketch­es and study sheets is unknown. As Otto Nau­mann has con­firmed, this draw­ing’s facil­i­ty of han­dling and its pow­ers of obser­va­tion make the attri­bu­tion to Van Mieris con­vinc­ing, as does its styl­is­tic cor­re­spon­dences to other draw­ings in his oeu­vre.5

In his dis­tinc­tive way, Van Mieris made deft use of a vari­ety of thick­ness­es of black chalk in var­i­ous pas­sages in this work, as seen in the con­trast between the fine lines of the wom­an’s face and hair with those that swift­ly bring togeth­er her head cov­er­ing on the right.

Young women viewed in pro­file recur fre­quent­ly in the paint­ings of Van Mieris in a num­ber of dif­fer­ent con­texts, such as regard­ing them­selves in a mir­ror, pet­ting a lap­dog, or address­ing a poten­tial suit­or. In this draw­ing, the head cov­er­ing remains loose and untied beneath her chin, a strik­ing and (for Van Mieris) unusu­al motif sug­ges­tive of a morn­ing or evening rit­u­al around the wom­an’s pri­vate toi­lette. It is entire­ly pos­si­ble that Van Mieris knew his model per­son­al­ly. While the sit­ter for this sheet does not resem­ble his wife, Cunera van der Cock, who is clear­ly iden­ti­fi­able in a num­ber of paint­ings, it might well depict anoth­er fam­i­ly or house­hold mem­ber. Not enough of her face is vis­i­ble to make a secure con­nec­tion with other mod­els Van Mieris used, but cer­tain facial fea­tures do resem­ble those found in some of his paint­ings, such as the Young Woman at Her Toi­lette from circa 1663 in the col­lec­tion of the Duke of Suther­land.6

A date in the early 1660s seems appro­pri­ate for this draw­ing as well, though he prob­a­bly made stud­ies like this through­out his career. The reemer­gence of this draw­ing adds an impor­tant new dimen­sion to our under­stand­ing of the artist as a draftsman.