The Golden Coat Painting

The Golden Coat A few years ago I became interested in the life and work of Michael Sweerts, 1618 1664 a brilliant Dutch baroque painter who travelled in Europe and the middle-east, eventually dying in Goa at the age of 46. None of his middle-eastern work survives and I began to speculate about what would have happened had he encountered Persian erotic miniatures, or Japanese Shunga prints, which he might easily have done. What would the result have been of the combination of the flattened stylised perspective of the oriental eye and the technical tricks and formulae of the northern 17th century chiaroscuro tradition. How would scenes of an intimate and explicit nature emerge from that multi-cultural fusion. Dutch baroque painting is laden with the erotic, but always deeply sublimated and concealed beneath a weight of black velvet and white laced suspicion of the excessive which constantly threatens to suffocate it. Shunga prints and Persian miniatures have a fun loving openness which betrays a much more comfortable relationship with the sensual. Masks always add an element of occult mystery and disassociation which turns the figures in paintings from portraits into archetypes; these are both inclusive and inviting, but simultaneously also a little alienating and unnerving. Here the oriental prince embraces and devours the happily - devoured, occidental showgirl in a swirl of kitschy, colourful chiaroscuro detail. In the current climate of suspicion and loathing in which our fears of ‘the other’, of conquest by demographics and miscegenation masquerade as insoluble cultural conflict, perhaps the glamour of Eros can help us find resolution