Smell

The fifth of Van Ostade's 1655 Senses series, this panel representing Smell completes the allegorical cycle with the sense most associated in Dutch genre painting with flowers, perfumes, and their dark inversions — the stench of poverty, the smoke of pipes, the smell of ale and unwashed bodies. Van Ostade's treatment of Smell is likely to depict a figure reacting to an odour — pleasant or unpleasant — through the characteristic wrinkling of the nose and narrowing of the eyes that the sense produces. The five senses as a group explore the full range of embodied human experience through the specific social context of Dutch low life, and Smell, as the most instinctive and least intellectual of the senses, suited Van Ostade's interest in the physical immediacy of his subjects.

Consistent with the companion Senses panels, the warm panel technique places a single figure in directional light. The representation of smell through visual means requires particular attention to facial expression — Van Ostade's careful observation of the nose, upper lip, and brow engaged in olfactory response is the technical core of the composition.