A Mother Feeding her Child (The Happy Mother) (1707): Artwork and History

A Mother Feeding her Child (The Happy Mother) (1707) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Willem van Mieris (Dutch, 1662–1747).

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

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.

Object facts

• Title: A Mother Feeding her Child (The Happy Mother)
• Date: 1707
• Artist attribution: Willem van Mieris (Dutch, 1662–1747)
• Place of origin: Holland
• Medium: Oil on panel
• Dimensions: 56.9 × 48.4 cm (22 3/8 × 19 1/16 in.); Framed: 83.2 × 74.6 × 6.4 cm (32 3/4 × 29 3/8 × 2 1/2 in.)
• Type: Painting
• Department: Painting and Sculpture of Europe
• Reference number: 1890.42

Collection credit

Gift of Edson Keith

View the original

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The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.