produce more works and having more possibilities of finding an interested collector. Willem van Mieris' artistic approach to painting included the repetition of similar figures and the features of figures. This approach provided both practical and aesthetic benefits to the artist. Not only did it allow the artist to be highly productive in the studio, it also allowed him to trademark his own type of idealized female figure throughout his oeuvre. Comparisons have been drawn between Willem van Mieris and Gerard ter Borch, another Dutch genre painter of the Dutch Golden Age, who used the technique of repeating figures to realize their common goal of increasing productivity while reducing labour. Willem van Mieris has also been compared to artists like Gerard ter Borch, Gerard Dou, and Jan Steen, for their shared artistic approach to painting which involved designing a group of interacting figures first, and subsequently designing the setting which the figures occupied. Painters like Willem van Mieris reused not only their own figures, but also those present in paintings by the masters of the previous generations. This was again due to the necessity of pleasing the few patrons and collectors, who greatly admired the works of artists such as Gerard Dou, a member of the first generation of fijnschilders. Willem van Mieris explicitly refers to Dou in two different paintings the subject of which is almost directly borrowed from the eminent master. In this respect, Van Mieris proved to be discreet enough to carefully choose which elements to take from other painters' works in order not to be accused of plagiarism, which was already an issue at the time. In fact, specific guidelines had already been established about how to refer to paintings by previous masters without ending up with mere copies of their work, which were obviously despised as signs of the painter's incapability of producing a work on his own. One of the major characteristics of Willem van Mieris' artistic style is his idealization of the female nude. Van Mieris' idea of beauty in genre paintings is deeply rooted in and modeled after his studies of classical sculpture. The artist's reference to classical sculpture follows the instructions outlined by Gerard de Lairesse for the improvement of genre painting in his book Groot Schilderboek. De Lairesse suggested that artists should refer to classical sculpture to create an idealized female nude form and should adapt this form to ordinary