Tobacco (Smell?)

Tobacco (Smell?) is another panel from Wautier's five senses series, here depicting the sense of smell through the fashionable new practice of tobacco smoking. Tobacco, introduced to Europe from the Americas in the sixteenth century, had become a widespread practice by the mid-seventeenth century, and its association with smell made it an ideal subject for this allegorical panel. Wautier's five senses series is among the most ambitious programmatic undertakings by any woman artist of the seventeenth century. Working in Brussels, she produced large-scale allegorical paintings that rival her male contemporaries in technical ambition and skill, engaging with the same programmatic subjects that occupied her male colleagues in the studios of Rubens and his circle. The five senses as an allegorical theme invited artists to paint contemporary life — the objects and practices of seventeenth-century daily existence — within a framework of classical allegory that gave these genre subjects intellectual respectability and courtly appeal.

The figure handling tobacco is rendered with naturalistic detail, the smoke and associated objects painted with careful attention to their sensory qualities.