MICHAEL SWEERTS | Portrait of a boy

With Thos. Agnew and Sons, London, 1979;
There acquired by the father of the present collector.

V. Bloch, 'Postskriptum zu Sweerts', in Album Amicorum J.G. van Gelder, The Hague 1973, p. 40, reproduced fig. 1;
R. Kultzen, Michael Sweerts, Doornspijk 1996, pp. 70-71 and 122, cat. no. 109, reproduced plate 109.

The following condition report has been provided by Simon Parkes of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc. 502 East 74th St. New York, NY 212-734-3920, simonparkes@msn.com, an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This work has not been recently restored. The paint layer is slightly dirty. Most of the retouches are visible under ultraviolet light. They occur in the background around the edges and in a line running through the upper right background up to the hairline. There is also restoration across the upper left corner. There are a few spots of retouching in the hair on either side of the head, a few spots in the darker side of the face and in the cheek on the left side. There are further retouches in the line of the shoulder in the lower right and in the white collar of his shirt. The condition is better than it looks at present. This is a simple but effective piece of work that should be more carefully retouched to reveal the character of the painting.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

One of the most unusual, creative and enigmatic artists of the Baroque period, with a career lasting little more than a tantalizing fifteen years, Michael Sweerts had a particular facility for portraying children. The fresh simplicity and innocence of a child's countenance clearly served Sweerts' exploration of the academic rules of portraiture, to which he was able to apply his distinctively plastic, monumental style of painting, and convey the psychological subtleties of a maturing personality. The present portrait is one such work, comparable to Sweerts' masterly Boy with a hat, in the Wadsworth Athenenum, Hartford, Conneticut,¹ the Head of a boy, in the Groninger Museum, Groningen,² or the Portrait of a youth in a private collection - all similarly intimate works which employ a muted palette to picture a child, head half-turned, expression serious. These portraits, thought to date from around the time that Sweerts left Rome to return to Brussels and Amsterdam (circa 1656 to 1661), embody the tension that renders the artist's work so intriguing. At once intimate yet remote, sympathetic yet cool, they blur the distinctions between portraits, character studies and genre paintings to produce works that hover between realism and idealization.

1 See G. Jansen and P.C. Sutton, Michael Sweerts (1618-1664), exh. cat., Amsterdam 2002, pp. 146-48, cat. no. XXIV, reproduced in color p. 147.
2 See Jansen and Sutton 2002, p. 146, under cat. no. XXIV, reproduced fig. XXIV-I.
3 See Jansen and Sutton 2002, p. 149, under cat. no. XXV, reproduced fig. XXV-I.