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Laban looking for the idols hidden by Rachel oil on canvas 58 x 771/2 in. (147.3 x 194 cm.) NOTES Jan Miel was a Flemish artist, born at Beveren, near Antwerp, but spent the majority of his life in Italy. He is recorded as being in Rome by 1633, where he signed and dated a pair of bambocciate now in the Louvre, and came immediately under the influence of Pieter van Laer ( il Bamboccio ('clumsy doll')) and the so-called Bamboccianti, a group of painters active in Rome in the mid-17th century, who specialized in small works representing genre or base subjects related to contemporary Italian life. At the same time Miel joined the Schildersbent or Bentvueghels ('birds of a flock'), a confraternity of Netherlandish artists, and was given the nickname 'Bieco' ('threatening look'). Apart from Michelangelo Cerquozzi, who was a native Roman, the principal Bamboccianti were either Dutch, Flemish, German or French in origin, and included Jan Miel, Jonhannes Lingelbach, Andries and Jan Both, Karel Dujardin, Michiel Sweerts and, for a short time, Sebastien Bourdon. Despite being intensely disliked by such champions of the Grand Manner as Salvator Rosa and Francesco Albani, the Bamboccianti were popular among the Roman aristocracy and bourgeoisie who were keen patrons of their work, and the group as a whole had a profound influence on low-life painting in the Netherlands and in 18th-century Italy. However, as late as 1641 Miel is recorded as a student of Andrea Sacchi and by the late 1640s he was developing a career as a history painter (see, for example, Miel's Sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus, Christie's, London, 13 December, 1996, lot 117 (œ280,000 = $462,000), datable to 1645). Between 1651 and circa 1654, the likely date of the present painting, Miel executed fresco cycles in the Roman churches of San Martino ai Monti ( Saint Cyril baptizing the Sultan of Iconium ), Santa Maria dell'Anima ( The Life of Saint Lambert ) and San Lorenzo in Lucina ( The Life of Saint Anthony of Padua ). Miel also painted smaller canvases with religious subjects for private patrons, such as the Adoration of the Shepherds and the Adoration of the Magi, in the Palazzo Barberini, Rome, and Saint Roch distributing Alms to the Poor in the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. In 1648 Miel became the first northern Italianate artist to be admitted to the Accademia di San Luca, and he is documented as being in Rome until 1658, when he moved to Turin and entered the service of Charles-Emanuel II, Duke of Savoy. He was still developing his talents as a figure painter in his last years in Turin. In Piedmont he was increasingly active as a painter of history subjects, displaying the same classicizing tendencies in his religious works of the 1650s. Having shifted his attentions almost exclusively in this direction, he studied and copied paintings by Raphael and the Carracci. We are grateful to Dr. Erich Schleier for the attribution to Miel and to Dr. Ursula Fischer Pace for confirming it.