Clothing the Naked

When it was painted

Around 1661, Michiel Sweerts was living in Amsterdam, a painter from Brussels in his early forties. The Met believes he painted this picture there, probably for a Catholic patron. Yet his thoughts were already turning far beyond the studio. He was getting ready to join a Catholic mission bound for Asia.

He had never stayed put for long. From the mid-1640s he worked in Rome, painting laborers, beggars, and artists busy in their studios, and he was made a knight while he was there. Back in Brussels in the mid-1650s, he opened a drawing academy for young artists.

The subject comes from the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus tells his followers that when he was naked, they clothed him. Feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and a handful of other kindnesses were grouped as the seven works of mercy, long urged by the Catholic Church. Sweerts had already painted the seven works as a series back in Rome, and several of those canvases now belong to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

In January 1662 he sailed from Marseille with a mission led by Bishop François Pallu. On the long road east he kept clashing with his companions, and in the end he was dismissed from the group. He traveled on anyway and reached Goa, the Portuguese colony on India's west coast, where he died in 1664.

The painting came to the Metropolitan Museum in 1984. Look again at the two pairs of hands: fingertips pinching the white shirt, and palms pressed together on a bare chest. Knowing that the painter soon set out on a journey he never returned from, the shirt starts to feel like more than a piece of cloth.