A fine Amsterdam couple - Cornelis Ploos van Amstel and Elisabeth Troost, by George van der Mijn, 1758

These are the wedding portraits of Amsterdam art collector Cornelis Ploos van Amstel and Elisabeth Troost, the daughter of the painter Cornelis Troost. The bride was a surprisingly mature - for the time - twenty-eight years old at the time of the marriage, and the couple had been acquainted for some years, as the groom was a collector of her father’s work. Interestingly, the drawing that Ploos van Amstel is holding in his portrait is said to be the work of Van der Mijn’s brother Frans. Both paintings are in the collection of the Mauritshuis.

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George van der Mijn (1723, London - 1763, Amsterdam), Dutch painter of portraits and genre works. The son of the painter Herman van der Mijn, he was born in London after his father had moved there. Besides his father, his brothers Robert, Frans, Andreas, and Gerard, as well as their sister Cornelia, were all artists. He studied with his father, after whose death he became a pupil of his elder brother Frans. He moved to Amsterdam with Frans and remained there until his death at the age of just forty. His early death accounts for the small size of his oeuvre.

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I somehow managed to confuse the authors of these portraits and first wrote a biographical sketch of George's brother Frans. I'm very glad I caught the goof in time. But since I was able to find a bit more information on this other brother - and he did seem rather more interesting - I'm sharing the thing, anyway... out of plain stubbornness! 

Frans van der Mijn (1719, Düsseldorf - 1783, London), Dutch portrait painter. The son of painter Herman van der Mijn, he was born in Düsseldorf, where his father had gone to work for Johann Wilhelm, Elector Palatine. He spent most of his career in England working as a portraitist, both in London and the country. He also worked in Amsterdam from 1742 until 1748, and then The Hague before returning to England; he sent a painting in to the London Society of Artists each year from1761 to 1772. In 1808, he was described in Edward Edwards' "Anecdotes of Painters" as having: "considerable merit as an artist, but was of mean address and vulgar manners: He loved smoking and drinking, nor would forego his pipe, though it was offensive to his employers, so that he never acquired the practice which he might otherwise have obtained. He boasted, that after he had painted a portrait, the likeness remained so strong upon his memory, that if the picture were immediately obliterated, he could repaint the resemblance without the assistance of the sitter." He is said to have died, impoverished, at the age of sixty-three or sixty-four.