Sight

Adriaen van Ostade's Five Senses series, painted in 1655 and of which this panel represents Sight, uses the popular allegorical framework of the senses to structure genre observations of Dutch peasant and craftsman life. The Sense of Sight was conventionally depicted through the act of reading, looking through spectacles, or examining an object — occupations that in mid-seventeenth-century Dutch culture carried associations with both literacy and scholarship, values the prosperous urban bourgeoisie projected even onto humble subjects. Van Ostade trained under Frans Hals in Haarlem and became the leading practitioner of low-life genre interior subjects, earning the admiration of Rembrandt and considerable commercial success. The New-York Historical Society's holding of this panel as part of the Senses series reflects the strong American collecting interest in Dutch cabinet painting from the late nineteenth century onward.

On panel, Van Ostade uses his characteristic warm-brown tonality, with figures emerging from deep shadow through carefully modulated transitions. The figure representing Sight is placed in a pool of directional light that illuminates the face and the object of attention, while the surrounding interior dissolves into warm darkness — a compositional formula indebted to Rembrandt's chiaroscuro.