Michiel Sweerts

Michiel Sweerts had two lives, and the second one is hard to explain. Born in Brussels in 1618, he went to Rome in the 1640s and fell in with the Bamboccianti, the northern painters there who made small scenes of ordinary Roman life. His own pictures were quieter and stranger than most, calm studies of beggars, craftsmen and young models, painted with a still, grave tenderness that later admirers compared to Vermeer.

Back in Brussels by the mid-1650s, he won permission to open his own drawing academy and published a set of prints of heads meant as teaching aids, the kind of model a pupil would copy. He was clearly serious about training the next generation.

Then he walked away from all of it. Around 1660 in Amsterdam he became a lay brother with a French Catholic missionary society and sailed east with them in 1661. His companions found him unstable and consumed by an ungovernable religious zeal, and the mission dismissed him along the way. He got as far as Goa, the Portuguese colony on the coast of India, and died there in 1664, aged 45.