The Five Senses: Hearing

Hearing, in Jan Miense Molenaer's set of the five senses, is a group of drunkards singing, slurring their way through a song on a panel roughly the size of a sheet of writing paper.

Rowdy peasants were a fairly new subject for Dutch buyers. The Flemish painter Adriaen Brouwer, who spent time in Haarlem in the mid-1620s, had made smoky taverns and their drinkers into pictures collectors wanted, and younger Haarlem painters, Adriaen van Ostade among them, took the subject up. Molenaer painted this set in 1637. The Mauritshuis records no signature on this panel, though its four companions all carry his monogram.