The Serenade

Frans van Mieris the Elder painted The Serenade around 1678–80, late in his career, showing a musician serenading a woman in the characteristic idiom of Dutch domestic genre at its most refined and self-consciously luxurious. Van Mieris was the acknowledged master of the Leiden school's 'fine painting' tradition—the fijnschilderij—that took the velvet, satin, and fur textures of Gerard Dou and Gerrit ter Borch and refined them further toward a porcelain-like surface of extraordinary delicacy. Serenade scenes belonged to the genre of amorous or musical subject matter that allowed the Leiden painters to display their technical virtuosity with costume and domestic accessories. By the late 1670s Van Mieris's work had achieved an almost hallucinatory precision that was both deeply admired and slightly uncanny.

Van Mieris's fijnschilderij technique involves building up the painted surface through layer after layer of extremely fine, almost imperceptible brushwork, creating a surface that seems to have no texture at all—closer to enamel than canvas. The satin of the woman's dress and the musician's velvet are rendered with the extreme precision that defined the Leiden school's ambitions. Light is distributed with careful control, each reflective surface responding with precise accuracy.