Head of a Woman

A woman whose thin hair is tightly wrapped in a white scarf looks out at the viewer with teary eyes and a toothless smile. The urban poor of Rome and the peasants of the countryside inspired Michael Sweerts during his stay in Italy in the mid-1600s, and where other painters made caricatures of such sitters he treated her with compassion, vividly capturing her inner beauty while recording with exactness the loose skin, the thinning hair and the wart on the left side of her face. Although the painting is highly finished, Sweerts’s rich brushwork is evident throughout. The painting is held in the J. Paul Getty Museum.