A Painter’s Studio

In the second half of the 1640s Rome was full of young painters from the north, and Michiel Sweerts, a Fleming from Brussels, was one of them. Here he shows a whole Roman studio at once. A boy sits in front with a drawing board on his knee. Further back a painter works at his easel from a nude model, while two men in hats look on. Through the open doorway at the far side someone bends over a table preparing paint. A plaster figure with its muscles laid bare, the kind of anatomical model students learned from, stands on a pedestal with another young man drawing beneath it. The foreground belongs to a heap of casts after ancient sculpture, heads, limbs and a pale mask piled up like rubble. The only daylight comes from a small barred window high on the wall.