The elder Frans, born at Leyden in 1635, became a pupil of Gerard Dou, though, like the latter, he had first been taught by a painter on glass. The earliest part of his career was still within the best period of Holland genre, but before he died in 1681 the decline was come; and it was to this that his son and pupil, Willem, succeeded. Willem’s pictures are still clever but tricky, hard and glossy in texture, trivial and often silly in motive. As for his son, Frans the Younger, he belongs to the decadence, and the Dutch consider his pictures of no merit. There was still another Mieris, Jan by name, the brother of Willem, who, however, lived mostly abroad and died at the age of thirty in Rome. Frans the Elder was popular in his own day and continued to be held in high esteem by collectors of the eighteenth century. He has been ranked with Metsu, but not with justice to the latter, for some of his work betrays that pettiness of motive and method which marked the decadence of genre and has been aptly called the “snuff-box” style. On the other hand, he had his moments of more genuine artistry, when he would paint a picture that even in comparison with Metsu is acceptable. These are chiefly to be found in the galleries of Munich, Vienna, and St. Petersburg. Among the Munich examples is _The Sick Woman_; she seems to have sunk to the floor in a faint and is being tended by an old woman, while a doctor in the shaded background is holding up a bottle of cordial to the light and gazing at it--a figure very familiar in Dutch genre. Unfortunately the subject suggests Jan Steen and the superior _esprit_ with which he would have treated it. The lady wears a reddish jacket trimmed with white fur, and the same garment reappears in _The Oyster Breakfast_. Here a girl is seated at a table holding an oyster in one hand and a wine-glass in the other. The picture represents the finer side of Van Mieris, though it is surpassed by another example in the Munich Gallery, _The Girl Before a Mirror_, which possesses the quality that has suggested the coupling of this artist’s name with that of Metsu.