#dina margareta de bye

[art-portraits]

Portrait of Dina Margareta de Bye

Artist: Willem van Mieris (Dutch, 1662-1747)

Date: 1705

Medium: Oil on panel

Collection: The Leiden Collection, New York City, NY, United States

Description

Standing before an imaginary rocky landscape, a woman handsomely attired in an orange-tinged brown satin dress with an aqua-blue shawl draped across her body smiles charmingly out at the viewer. On the left, behind a partially drawn curtain and in front of a pillar, stands a fountain with a statue of a cupid riding a sea monster. The woman holds an orange in her left hand and carefully selects a red carnation from a bunch of flowers lying on a stone plinth faced with a carved relief sculpture of an unidentified allegorical subject. Resting on this garden plinth is a colored drawing of a flower, a small wooden box, some paintbrushes, and a couple of shells containing pigments.

The identification of the sitter is established by an eighteenth-century inscription written in Dutch on the back of the panel: “Dina Margareta de Bye, born on 7 May 1680 and deceased on 26 August 1740.” Dina Margareta was the second daughter of Johan Paeuw de Bye, a lawyer from Leiden, and his wife, Anna van Oorthoorn. In 1703 Dina Margareta married Pieter van der Dussen (1675–1726), also a lawyer, and moved from Leiden, where she apparently had been living with her parents on the Rapenburg, to her husband’s native city of Dordrecht. As Willem van Mieris already enjoyed a great reputation among the Leiden elite, he was a suitable choice to portray the esteemed Dina Margareta, even after she had moved to Dordrecht.

[rubenista]

Willem van Mieris, Portrait of a young lady with a spaniel, possibly Dina Margareta de Bye (1680-1740), a landscape beyond, c. early 18th century. Oil on panel, 27.9 x 23 cm. Private collection. 

[galleryofunknowns]

Willem van Mieris (b.1662-d.1747), 'Portrait of a Young Lady with a Spaniel, possibly Dina Margareta de Bye (b.1680-d.1740)', oil on panel, 1600s, Dutch, sold for $212,000 USD in Christies Old Master Paintings and Sculpture sale, October 2019, New York, USA.

Willem van Mieris, son of the Leiden fijnschilder (fine painter) Frans van Mieris, probably executed this engaging portrait of a well-dressed woman standing behind a balustrade around the turn of the eighteenth century. The sitter may well be Dina Margareta de Bye, the second daughter of the Leiden lawyer Johan Paeuw de Bye and his wife Anna van Oorthoorn, based on similarities in her facial features with those found in a securely identified portrait of her dated 1705 and today in The Leiden Collection, New York. Indeed, an estate inventory drawn up following de Bye's death lists three portraits by van Mieris – one of her deceased husband, Peter van der Dussen, and two of de Bye herself – decorating a large room in her fashionable house on the Rapenburg in Leiden. The relief at lower center depicting Diana and Callisto is based on a work by Francis van Bossuit known today through a drawn copy by van Mieris (sold Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 24 April 1997, lot 109). (x)