Taste

The second of Van Ostade's 1655 Senses series, this panel representing Taste depicts the act of eating or drinking — the most socially and physically immediate of the five senses in the allegorical tradition. In Van Ostade's low-life genre context, Taste is not the refined culinary culture of aristocratic banquets but the robust, unself-conscious eating and drinking of ordinary people in inn or domestic settings. The figure presumably raises food or drink to the mouth in the concentrated gesture of pure sensory experience, stripped of social performance. The five senses as an allegorical subject had been a vehicle for moralising about excess, but by the mid-seventeenth century Dutch painters were treating the framework with more descriptive than didactic purpose.

Van Ostade's panel technique for this Senses group is consistent across all five works: warm brown ground, figure emerging from shadow into directional light, carefully observed face and hands as the primary expressive instruments. The act of tasting is communicated through the positioning of hands and the slightly open mouth of the figure.