The Five Senses: Smell

Painters who set out to show the sense of smell usually reached for flowers, a young woman raising a rose or a posy to her face. When Jan Miense Molenaer painted his five senses in 1637, he reached for a small child's dirty bottom instead.

It is the broadest joke of the series, and it is deliberate. Across the five panels Molenaer swapped the refined allegory for the cottage and the tavern, where the senses meet the world at its most basic. The panel is barely 20 centimetres high, and his monogram, the letters IMR joined together, is on the table at the left.