SWEERTS, Michiel

This painting is not a portrait in the conventional sense. It is a tronie in which the figure represents a certain character or type. The Young Maidservant is among the largest of Sweerts’s tronies which are all thought to have been painted in either Brussels or Amsterdam where the artist stayed between 1655 and 1661,

Sweerts painted the maidservant with his typical mixture of realism and idealisation. Her body is turned to the left, while she looks over her shoulder to the right with a rather dreamy look, as if loss in thought. This painting has often been compared with Johannes Vermeer’s iconic Girl with a Pearl Earring which is dated c. 1665, some five years after the present painting. Until 2011, the paintings by Sweerts and Vermeer were in fact displayed together in the Vermeer Room of the Mauritshuis.

This painting contains many reminiscences of Italian art, particularly in the idealization of the figure. It has been suggested that the painting is allegorical, the posy of flowers possibly referring to the sense of smell, in line with iconographical formulae for the five senses which became popular in the 17th century. The turban gives the sitter an exotic look, as does the melancholy gaze. Both elements contribute to the painting’s enigmatic feel.

The artist’s portraits of children date from his activity in Brussels from 1656-1659.

In Sweerts’s paintings the accent lies fairly strongly on the dramatic constrasts between the brightly illuminated and therefore emphatically modelled characters and their much darker surroundings. He often took his subject matters from daily life in Rome where he was active between 1646 and 1651. In these paintings, such as the Roman Wrestlers, it is striking how he paints his humble characters in poses, gestures and arranged in compositions that look classicist and are even reminiscent of antique sculptural models.

This is one of the three existing self-portraits of the artist. He represents himself before a mountainous Italianate landscape with the attributes of his craft.

This scene is set outside on a dark night, so that the background appears barely sketched in. Against this background, two figures are illuminated by a focused light source. The foreground is painted in greyish-brown tones, against which, sharply and precisely drawn, the yellow riding coat and the red cape stand out as the real subjects of the painting.

Sweerts was born and trained in Brussels: he spent several years in Rome but was back in Brussels by 1656 when he received permission to open an academy in the city. He joined the guild in Brussels in 1659 but two years later travelled to the Far East as a member of a Catholic missionary expedition. He died in Goa in 1664.

Sweerts painted a number of pictures showing young artists drawing from plaster casts and drawing from life outside the studio, but this is his only painting of an academy. The work has a special significance in Sweerts’s life as we know that he ran an ‘academie van die teeckeninghen naer hetleven’ (an academy for drawing from the life) in Brussels. While learning to draw from the antique and from models in his master’s studio was a part of every Dutch and Flemish apprentice artist’s training, academies of this type were rare in the Netherlands. Among the few precedents were those set up by Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem, Hendrick Goltzius and Carel van Mander in Haarlem around 1590, and by Hendrick van Uylenburgh in Amsterdam in the 1620s. Sweerts, having lived in Italy for several years, presumably had Italian prototypes in mind such as the academy established by Baccio Bandinelli in 1531 in the Belvedere in Rome.

Around the same time that he applied to open his academy, Sweerts made a series of etchings to be used in teaching young students to draw. Sadly, nothing more is known of Sweerts’s academy.

This scene provides evidence of the artist’s style in his initial Roman period in the sphere of the Bamboccianti, the name given to the painters of Flemish origin active in Rome whose special focus was on scenes drawn from popular life, with small, highly characterized figures.

This painting is an excellent composite of all the different kind of inspiration which Rome could offer. A young artist is drawing a modern sculpture by Bernini, while further off there are classical ruins and a glimpse of landscape, and on the right a busy scene with hawkers and beggars.