See – Taste- Touch
They were described by Aristoteles no less – the five senses of human perception. In art history they have long been a popular subject, depicted by among others, Jan Brueghel the Elder and Pieter Paul Rubens. The upcoming Old Master Paintings Auction at Palais Dorotheum includes the ‘The Three Allegories of Sense‘ by the Flemish baroque painter Frans Wouters.
After being apprenticed in the workshop of Peter Van Avont in Antwerp, Frans Wouters became a student of Rubens in 1634 – the same year he joined the Guild of St. Luke, of which he later became dean. His talent led him to hold prestigious positions. The first of these was an appointment as court painter to Emperor Ferdinand II in Vienna, who sent him to England as ambassador in 1637. There, the artist met his compatriot Anthony Van Dyck and came into contact with the Prince of Wales, the future King Charles II, who became one of his patrons. In 1648, he was appointed court painter by the Regent Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, governor of Flanders.
Price Estimate € 50.000 – 70.000, Old Masters Auction, 19th April 2016
Wouters was able to transpose the grandiloquent manner of his teacher Rubens to small compositions marked by a detailed and decorative style primarily expressed in landscape painting and mythological or allegorical scenes. Wouters was a popular exponent of this kind of cabinet painting, which was intended to decorate – and to complete, in an iconographical sense – the so-called Wunderkammer (‘cabinet of wonders’), popular in European courts at the time. These collections included all sorts of curiosities, wonders, rare items, naturalia and artificialia – essentially everything embracing any field of human knowledge or nature.
Price Estimate € 50.000 – 70.000, Old Masters Auction, 19th April 2016
International patrons were fond of cabinet paintings depicting a multitude of themes including, for example, alchemy, the four elements, visual devices like trompe l’oeil, and, of course, allegories of the five senses, popular above all in Flanders in the 17th century.
Price Estimate € 50.000 – 70.000, Old Masters Auction, 19th April 2016
The point of reference for these allegories were the five panels of the ‘Allegory of the Senses’ painted in 1617 by Pieter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder for the King of Spain, now preserved in the Museo del Prado. Around this time, Brueghel had led a group of artists in creating a pair of allegorical paintings: one depicting taste, hearing and touch,the other sight and smell. These works were acquired in 1618 by the city of Antwerp and donated to Grand Duke Albrecht and his wife Isabella. Although the pair of paintings was destroyed in a fire in the 18th century, two replica paintings by Brueghel were taken to Madrid by Isabella of Bourbon for the royal collections in 1636 and are currently conserved – along with the series of the Five Senses – in the Museo del Prado. Frans Wouters would have certainly been familiar these paintings and is likely to have to have taken inspiration from them in the creation of his own work.
Our specialist Mark MacDonnell would be delighted to assist with further queries relating to the paintings.
Old Masters Auction
Thursday , 19th April 2016, 5pm
Preview from 9th April 2016
Palais Dorotheum
You can find information on these three works and all other objects in the auction in our Online Catalogue!