Jan Miel was born in 1599 in Beveren-Waes Near Antwerp. Though his presence is documented only after 1636, Jan Miel is thought to have arrived in Rome early in the decade, certainly by 1633, where he rapidly came under the influence of Pieter van Laer and the Bamboccianti. This group was comprised of mainly ex-patriot artists from the Netherlands, Flanders, France and Germany who specialized their practice in painting usually small-scale works of low or trivial subjects taken from contemporary Italian life. Miel worked primarily on such a scale during his earlier years in Rome, but during the 1640s, his work increased in size with more ambitious multi-figural compositions of Roman life. It appears to have been these larger works which gL. Trezzani in G. Briganti, L. Trezzani and L. Laurenti, The Bambocianti: The Painters of Everyday Life in Seventeenth Century Art, Rome, 1983, p. 102...