Village Surgeon (The Sense of Touch)

Painters in the Low Countries liked to give the five senses a rough, comic face. In 1637 the Haarlem painter Jan Miense Molenaer showed Touch as a peasant pushing his hand up a woman's skirt while she beats him over the head with a slipper. Brouwer chose pain instead. Here touch means a wound being treated. The museum points out how close together he packs the three heads, the patient, the man doing the treatment and an onlooker, so that your eye has nowhere to go but the wound. With just a few lines he gets across the patient's pain and the surgeon's tension. The whole scene fits on an oak panel about 23 centimetres tall, and it hangs in the same cabinet as two other senses from the series, Taste and Hearing.