The Five Senses: Taste

Taste, in Jan Miense Molenaer's five senses, comes as a beer jug and a pipe. The pipe is less odd than it looks. By the 1630s tobacco had spread through every class in the Dutch Republic, and the Dutch spoke of drinking it, so a smoker belonged to the sense of taste as naturally as a drinker.

Molenaer painted the set in 1637 on five small panels of almost identical size, and they have stayed together. In 1893 the Mauritshuis bought all five at once from a collector in Helvoirt, a village in the south of the Netherlands, for 1,500 guilders.