Michael Sweerts

Michael Sweerts (1618-1664) was born in Brussels to a prosperous family with ties to the textile trade. We know nothing of his artistic training, but he was living with other Northern painters in Rome by 1646 and may have operated an informal drawing academy there for other artists who shared his passion for the lessons of the Antique, Renaissance and Baroque periods. Sweerts conveyed in his work the lessons of Counter-Reformation teaching and benefitted from the generous patronage of the church. His faith also profoundly shaped his life. After a few years in the late 1650s in Brussels (where he led another art school, intended to help revive the tapestry-making industry), about 1660 he joined a newly formed French Catholic confraternity called the Société des Missons Etrangères, under the leadership of François Pallu, Bishop of Heliopolis. By late 1661, the society had set off from Amsterdam for China, traveling overland to Marseilles, from which Sweerts and another nine lay and clerical evangelists set sail for Palestine in early January 1662. The journey was difficult and four of the ten men died. As the company continued on through Syria and eastern Turkey to Tabriz in northern Persia (now Iran), the opinionated Sweerts grew irascibly argumentative. Once the group reached Isfahan in central Persia, the Bishop dismissed him from the confraternity’s ranks. Somehow Sweerts made his way to the Indian coast; he died in the Portuguese Jesuit enclave of Goa two years later.