of Willem van Mieris' pupils. Van der Mij painted mostly portraits, borrowing from van Mieris' style. His portraits were highly regarded because of how much they resembled the sitters, who were usually high status individuals including professors or regents of the armhouse. Willem van Mieris also took care of training his son Frans in the art of painting: when the old artist was forced to retire from active work due to his progressive blindness, he passed on his studio to his son, and the two consistently worked together. However, Frans van Mieris the Younger was not nearly as successful as his father and grandfather: only very few of his works are known to us, and he never managed to gain popularity among collectors. Some of his paintings were even refused by the commissioner, as happened with the German prince of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, who decided not to accept Frans's Diana bathing (executed in close collaboration with Willem) due to its poor quality. After these unsatisfactory results, Frans van Mieris the Younger soon quit painting to dedicate himself to antiquarian collections: he was a highly esteemed expert in numismatics, a field he wrote several renowned treatises on. Key works Paintings In Willem van Mieris' painting of Bathsheba from 1708, Bathsheba is depicted in the nude sitting before King David. In October 1707, while van Mieris worked on Bathsheba, ten works by the sculptor van Bossuit were sold from the collection of van Mieris' patron Petronella Oortmans-de la Court, bringing attention to the sculptures of van Bossuit and influencing van Mieris's work. When comparing van Mieris's Bathsheba to two of his drawings that he produced after van Bossuit's sculptures, namely Venus and Cupid and Diana and Callisto, the influence that van Bossuit's sculptures played on Bathsheba becomes evident. In van Mieris's drawing Venus and Cupid, Venus's facial profile shows a strong resemblance to Bathsheba's. In the painter's drawing Diana and Callisto, the position of Diana's body is also similar to that of Bathsheba's. Consequently, it is believed that Bathsheba's graceful pose and gesture, characteristic of van Mieris's trademarked idealized female nude, is directly borrowed from van Bossuit's sculptures. In Willem van Mieris's Lute Player from 1711, the woman depicted in the painting strikingly resembles Bathsheba, which is representative of the painter's repetition of figures. In Willem van Mieris's painting Granida and Daifilo from 1697, he depicts a scene from P.C. Hooft's pastoral play Granida,