Hearing

Hearing, one of a series depicting the Five Senses and dated around 1700 in the Augustiner Museum, Freiburg, participates in a genre that became a Flemish speciality from the early seventeenth century. Jan Brueghel the Elder and Rubens produced the most celebrated version around 1617–18, and Francken contributed his own interpretations throughout his career. The Senses series offered both encyclopaedic breadth — displaying the full range of human sensory experience — and an opportunity to crowd images with luxury objects appropriate to each sense: instruments, flowers, spices, mirrors, and foodstuffs. Hearing's visual vocabulary centred on musical instruments, singing figures, and listening animals, allowing the painter to demonstrate his skill at still-life detail alongside figure painting. The Augustiner Museum version, dated 1700, may reflect either a late autograph work or a workshop production extending the series formula beyond Francken's death, a common practice in Antwerp's commercial ateliers.

Copper support gives the Senses series a jewel-like consistency across all five panels, with each sense depicted at the same intimate scale that rewards close scrutiny. Hearing's instruments — lutes, viols, keyboards — are rendered with enough specificity to identify their type and period, functioning as documentary still lifes within the allegorical programme.