Jan Miel

He collaborated with many artists in Rome and worked in the latter part of his career in Turin as the court painter of Charles Emanuel II, the Duke of Savoy.

[3] The seventeenth century Italian biographer Giovanni Battista Passeri refers to a training by Anthony van Dyck in Flanders but there is no independent evidence for this statement.

Miel's first dated paintings from the 1630s already show the influence of Pieter van Laer and the Bamboccianti in that they depict low-class subjects engaged in their normal business or at play.

Popular subjects included morra players, gamblers, village dances, quacks, barbers, cobblers, itinerant musicians and actors, etc.

Examples of his early work in this genre include The bowls players (Louvre) and The cobbler (Musée des Beaux-Arts et d'archéologie de Besançon), both produced in 1633.

The composition has traditionally been interpreted as depicting an itinerant medicine peddler with his assistants, who is demonstrating to a crowd of boorish onlookers the beneficial effects of his wares.

[7] Seventeenth-century genre painting regularly returned to the theme as can be seen in the works of Adriaen Brouwer, Jan Steen and David Teniers the Younger.

[8] During the 1640s and 1650s Miel began, just like Michelangelo Cerquozzi, to expand the scope of bambocciate paintings by paying less attention to the surrounding landscape and instead stressing the anecdotal aspects of city and country life.

The collaboration between the two artists commenced in 1635 and ended when Miel left Rome for Turin in 1658 to work at the court of Charles Emmanuel II, Duke of Savoy.

This is evident in An architectural capriccio with an ionic portico, a fountain, a two-story loggia, a Gothic palace and figures on a quay (Christie's, Sale 1708, Lot 56).

This composition depicts various groups of people acting independently of each other: there are an elegant couple on the lower left on the stairs, figures at the well next to them and card players on the steps in the distance.

[11] Miel's figures were typically farmers, beggars, morra players, innkeepers and porters often mixed with elegantly dressed men and women, who provided a rich flavor of Roman daily life to the architectural setting created by Salucci.

There are a number of works from the 1650s in this more dignified style such as an altarpiece of The Madonna and Child with Saints in the Duomo di Santa Maria della Scala in Chieri dating from 1651.