Peasant Family, with a Man Removing Fleas from Himself

Look at the woman in this picture, and the sky right around her is a shade lighter than the rest. Infrared images and X-ray fluorescence scans show why. Sweerts laid a dark grey layer under the paint around her figure, a halo that stopped the reddish-brown ground from glowing through and helped him set his lights and shadows. That finding feeds a question of date. The Mauritshuis places the canvas around 1656 to 1660, when Sweerts was back in Brussels. The art historian Lara Yeager-Crasselt has put it earlier, in his Roman years, and so far the dark halo has turned up only in paintings from his time in Italy, which were made on this kind of reddish ground. The painting once belonged to Vitale Bloch, the dealer and scholar who later wrote a monograph on Sweerts, and the museum bought it in 1951. It hangs in the Gallery Prince Willem V as part of the Mauritshuis collection.