Contact gallery for price		Michael Sweerts Brussels 1618 – 1664 Goa A Man and a Woman Playing Draughts Oil on canvas 39 1/3 x  19 1/4 inches (56 x 49 cm) Literature: To be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné on the artist by Dr. Lindsay Shaw Miller This image is immediately striking as a new, unknown painting by Michael Sweerts (1618-1664). The pallette, lighting, treatment of drapery and background (especially the dusk sky), facial types and  intense whites are all typical of Sweerts, as is the foreground of an earth floor strewn with loose stones. Paintings of players at draughts, dice or cards are quite usual in his oeuvre (see Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, A1958 [Kultzen 41]; Madrid, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum [ Kultzen 42 & Pl. XIV]; Paris, Louvre (signed) [Kultzen 43]; Location unknown (signed) [Kultzen 44]; Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, A2574 (signed and dated), [Kultzen 46]), but this one is unusual in having a woman and a man, rather than two or more men, competing in the game.  The couple sit opposite to each other and in profile to the viewer. They are elaborately and expensively dressed, seated in an elegant, classical interior, their legs and, implicitly, their feet touching beneath the table. They are playing at draughts and the man is making his move. As he does so he looks at the woman, who holds up an open fan and looks directly out at the viewer. The mood is heightened by a tension between the conventions of the scene and an arresting challenge in the woman's glance. The presence of a young girl in the middle ground, between the two figures, is a typical device of Sweerts, who sometimes places an attendant character right between the two protagonists (see, for example, Sheltering the Homeless  from The seven acts of mercy, Zürich, Fondation Rau, [Kultzen 51 & Pl. XV]). Her downcast, modest glance and concealing movement of her left hand contrasts with the confrontational glance of the woman, whose gesture with the fan, combined with the foreground contact of her legs with the man's, gives the picture a sexual current from which the young girl appears to be dissembling. There is a fragmentary signature along the crossbar of the man's chair. This is a very typical site for a Sweerts signature, incorporated subtly into the image, as in Portrait of Anthonij de Bordes  (New York, private collection, [Kultzen 32 & Pl.X]), in which the same attitude of juxtaposed legs and touching toes occurs, this time between the portrait subject and a servant, the signature being on the lower edge of a saddle that lies in the foreground. The mood of the picture coincides with three comparable images by Sweerts. The Amsterdam Draughtsplayers  (A. 2574), in which the protagonists are two young men, their feet again planted and almost touching, accompanied by four other youthful bystanders, is the closest. That painting is signed and dated Rome, 1652, but is in poor condition. The second is in Galerie Harrach in Vienna (Kultzen 76), also a group of three figures, two of them playing cards. The third is a larger group which was sold in Sweden in 1991 (Kultzen 80). The Amsterdam painting shows the two young men, seated in three-quarter view,  playing draughts. The central configuration is very similar in shape and scale to our picture. They and the three bystanders, a young man and two younger boys, one of whom points to another boy entering through the doorway, are all expensively and elaborately gaitered. Immediately striking is the similarity between the arrogant expression and small, sharp features of the young man closest to the viewer, with that of our woman draughtsplayer. Although his back is three-quarters turned to us, he looks directly at us, over his shoulder, with a glance of piercing insolence. The Harrach picture, although also damaged, has close similarities with the structure of our composition, especially the relation of the head of the central, younger boy to the two protagonists - in this case playing cards. Here the two opposing feet actually cross each other and the mood is lighter - the young man at the left shows us his excellent hand, a small, triumphant smile playing on his mouth, while his opponent is absorbed by his own, presumably less propitious hand; it is toward him that the head of the third bystander is sympathetically inclined. Damaged though the picture is, the similarity of handling of the hair, faces, feet and leggings to our picture is marked. Finally, the painting formerly in Stockolm is again of cardplayers. Here the composition is fuller, but there are some remarkable similarities. The painting is signed with a monogram on the box in the right foreground. There are three card players surrounded by a company of riflemen. The player at the left wears an elaborate, feathered hat that obscures most of his face. His hand rests on his hip, as does that of the man in our picture. The man at the right, who seems to be alarmed by the card he holds up in his hand, bears strong facial similarities to the man in our picture. The handling of draperies, too, is close: the right hand man's leggings and gaiters are especially so, as are the cloaks placed on a chair to the left and on the box at the right, as well as cuffs, sleeves and hats. Clarity is reduced  in some areas where the condition has lost some of its strength: for example, the hands on the draughtsboard, the face of the young girl, the dark areas of the man's cloak, the strewn floor and the landscape background. Nevertheless there is a freshness in the woman's face, a character and energy to the composition that are characteristic of Sweerts. The painting of structural details, too, such as the two chairs and the architecture of the room are very fine and typical of Sweerts, as is the articulation of lights and darks in the faces, in the relationship of clothing to background and in the crisp, dense whites. Images of soldiers playing draughts, dice or cards are usually a metonym for their uncertain fate in the battlefield. This is especially poignant in the formerly Stockholm image. However, Sweerts adapts the theme elsewhere, as in the Amsterdam painting, where the subject is probably young men on the grand tour, squandering money in pleasure rather than using it for their education  - though there may reside an allusion to their uncertain future; the game of life. In our picture, the adaptation seems to be to the game of love; the woman's upheld, open fan making a certain allusion to her availability, and her challenging look doing nothing to reduce the impact of that gesture. The woman has a very particular face; she appears to be the same model as in Sweerts' Portrait of a nun  (London art market, 1990, (Chaucer Fine Arts) [Kultzen 103] ), a painting which has also suffered (by having the skull painted out, probably in the nineteenth century). The comparative figures make a date after 1652, the date of the Amsterdam picture, the most likely. Sweerts had returned to Brussels from Rome by 1656, when he opened his own Academy, and the interior architecture of the picture is northern classicism, not Roman. Indeed, the shift from Sweerts' warm, earthy, Roman tones to these cooler northern ones is reminiscent of Pieter de Hooch's transition from simple interiors to more elaborate, mannered ones when he moved from Delft to Amsterdam. The iconography is northern, too: this is an elegant, wealthy Flemish household, headed by a mistress whose aggressive sexuality causes her young companion to shrink into modesty. This kind of social tension was very appealing to Netherlandish viewers, who knew that obvious wealth and restrained, elegant dress did not necessarily entail moral virtue. The fact that this is more of a Dutch theme than a Flemish one need not distract us. Many of Sweerts' paintings have a Dutchness about them, which is why he was thought, until his baptismal record was found in the 1960s, to have been Dutch. He was also very closely involved with an Amsterdam merchant family, the Deutzes, who both bought and commissioned his work and for whom he was an agent while he was in Rome. Indeed, the fluctuations of Flemish, Dutch and Roman elements have presented some of the most fascinating challenged to scholars of Sweerts' work for more than a century. This painting seems to come from a moment of transition in Sweerts' career, when he was readjusting his subject matter to a northern market and accommodating himself to the establishment of his northern Academy. Yet it comes before he moves inwards in focus to his allegorical and dualistic half-lengths, in which the narrative of contrast that we see in this picture is given a more intense philosophical treatment. Our picture, then, would seem to date from 1656-57, the time of his arrival and reestablishment in Brussels, but before his conversion, in 1659,  to the French Society of Foreign Missionaries that  changed so radically the last part of his life.   Lindsey Shaw-Miller Edward Speelman Fellow Wolfson College Cambridge England The earliest writers on Sweerts this century, W. Martin, G.J. Hoogewerff, R. Longhi, W. Stechow and  R. Kultzen (in his original thesis of 1954) all assumed he was Dutch. Only Vitale Bloch, when he published his small book on Sweerts in 1965, found evidence for his Flemish background in publishing an appendix, edited by Jean Guennou, of the documents relatiing to Sweerts in the Archive de la Société des Missions Etrangères, in which he is recorded as 'peintre Bruxellois'. His baptismal record was then published by Didier Bodart in 1970: Didier Bodart, Les peintres des Pays-bas méridionaux et de la principauté de liège a Rome au XVII siècle, (2 vols.), Brussels/Rome 1970, p.421, n.2. For an excellent account of Sweerts' involvement with the Deutz family, see J. Bikker, The Deutz brothers, Italian paintings and Michiel Sweerts: new information from Elisabeth Coymans's Journael , in Simiolus 26/4, 1998