The Senses of Hearing, Touch and Taste

The royal palace in Brussels burned in 1731, and two large allegories of the senses burned with it. The city of Antwerp had commissioned them as a gift to its rulers, Archduke Albert and Isabella Clara Eugenia. Jan Brueghel led the work and twelve painters of the city worked on them with him. This canvas and its companion, Sight and Smell, are replicas made around 1620, and they are now the main record of what the lost pair looked like. Five women stand for the five senses in a room heaped with instruments, silver and pictures, and the pictures on the walls are identifiable, by Bosch, Joost de Momper, Sebastian Vrancx, Rubens, Frans Snyders and Jan Wildens. It came to Madrid for the queen's tower in the Alcazar, and the canvas has never been lined.