The Five Senses: Touch

In 1617 and 1618, in Antwerp, Jan Brueghel and Rubens painted the five senses as a series of graceful women in rooms crowded with costly things. Twenty years later Jan Miense Molenaer took the same old theme and handed it to peasants. His Touch is a good beating.

This small panel belongs to a set of five, and it is the one that carries both his monogram and the date, 1637, at the lower right. The Mauritshuis points out that Molenaer mostly painted portraits and genre scenes his well-off buyers could recognise themselves in. For the senses he chose rough country behaviour instead, which city collectors would have found all the more entertaining.