A Man feeling his Purse (Touch)

Dated 1650 and held in the National Gallery Prague, this panel represents Touch as the sensation of feeling one's own purse — a subject with a dual social resonance: the miser checking his coins and the ordinary man experiencing the tactile reality of his wealth or poverty. In Dutch genre painting, the purse was a loaded object: a symbol of commercial life, of prudence, of anxiety about financial security in a mercantile society. Van Ostade's treatment is sympathetically human rather than satirical — the figure's absorbed attention to the purse's contents reads as ordinary concern rather than comic avarice. Prague's National Gallery holds important Dutch and Flemish holdings acquired through Bohemian aristocratic collecting networks of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

On panel, Van Ostade places the purse and the hands holding it in the composition's strongest light, directing the viewer's attention to the specific sensory action being depicted. The figure's face is partially in shadow, shifting the primary expressive focus from facial to manual gesture — appropriate for a painting about the sense of touch.