Frans van Mieris’s Painting Technique as One of the Possible Sources for Willem Beurs’s Treatise on Painting

The seventeenth-century artist Frans van Mieris was masterful in the realistic rendering of different materials, like satin, velvet, fur and metal. His work could well have been the source for the slightly younger Willem Beurs’s 1692 treatise on painting. This paper will show how acute Van Mieris observations were in depicting these materials, and the role that reflections play in our perception of their realism.