A Girl Holding a Glass ("Taste", One of a Series of the Five Senses)

A Girl Holding a Glass, painted in 1620 and now in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, belongs to Hendrick ter Brugghen's series representing the Five Senses — a popular allegorical theme that had circulated through Flemish and Dutch art since the late sixteenth century. The sense of Taste was typically personified by a figure eating, drinking, or tasting, and ter Brugghen's choice of a young woman holding a glass of wine falls squarely within this tradition. What distinguishes his treatment is the figure's natural immediacy: she is not performing allegory so much as inhabiting it, her slight sideways glance giving her the quality of a person caught in a private moment rather than posed for symbolic display. The Five Senses series was a vehicle through which Dutch painters could explore the pleasures and vulnerabilities of the body under the guise of moral categorisation — sensory experience was both celebrated and implicitly warned against as a distraction from spiritual duty. Ter Brugghen's version navigates this ambiguity with characteristic subtlety, offering a figure that is simultaneously appealing and thoughtful. The strong Caravaggist lighting, with its deep shadow and luminous face, gives the subject a gravity that elevates it above mere decorative genre.

Single-source lighting from the left creates the high contrast typical of ter Brugghen's single-figure compositions from this period. The glass vessel is rendered with careful attention to transparency and reflected light, a technically demanding element that serves both descriptive and symbolic purposes. Costume is depicted in loose, rapid strokes that contrast with the careful modelling of the face.