(Lier 1612–1659 Antwerp)
An Allegory of Taste,
oil on panel, 56.5 x 89.2 cm, framed

Provenance:
Gemäldesalon Josef Kuba, Karlsbad;
sold to Cesar Adda (1878-1939), Egypt 1935;
with Rodolfo Monfredini;
sold to Artaki Gurjian, Egypt 1951;
Private European collection

This painting must originally have been part of a series representing the Five Senses, of which three have been found, in addition to the Allegory of Taste under consideration here, those of Sight (see lot 29) and Touch (see lot 30). In the past these works were attributed to Jan Brueghel the Younger, the three Allegories are now considered autograph works by the Flemish artist Frans Wouters.

In the present Allegory, everything colludes to evoke the sense of taste and the idea of ​​abundance: a plump boy offering grapes to the woman at the centre of the painting, a table well-laden with dishes, an extraordinary wealth of fruit and game, and a woman intently cooking meat in a kitchen in the background. But at another level of symbolic interpretation, we can recognise, as always happens with this kind of representation, elements that lead back to profound moral and Christological themes: the rich scene of still life with game, with a magnificent peacock killed but still intact, points to the theme of voluptas carni (pleasures of the flesh), which links – albeit in the opposite, positive sense – with the subject depicted in the top right of the painting: the hermit Saint Onouphrius who, having renounced worldly life and fled to live in the desert, receives as his only sustenance a little food brought to him daily by an angel. The painting hanging above the kitchen door, depicting Eve proffering the forbidden fruit to Adam, instead refers to the themes of salvation: sin and redemption.

Lots 28–30
Three Allegories of the Senses by Frans Wouters

Frans Wouters was apprenticed in the workshop of Peter Van Avont in Antwerp, afterwards he 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: first of all the appointment as court painter in Vienna to Emperor Ferdinand II, 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. Wouters was able to transpose the grandiloquent manner of his great master Rubens to small compositions marked by a detailed and decorative style, expressed above all in landscape painting and graceful mythological or allegorical scenes. This kind of cabinet painting, of which Wouters was one of the most popular exponents, was intended to decorate – and in a sense to complete, in an iconographical sense – the so-called Wunderkammer (‘room of wonders’) popular in European courts at the time, in which all sorts of curiosities, wonders, rare items, or made with rare materials, both naturalia and artificialia, were collected - everything embracing any field of human knowledge or nature.

Linked to this multifaceted approach to reality was the extraordinary appreciation from international patrons with regard to cabinet paintings showing themes associated with alchemy, the four elements and all the iconography that lent itself to different levels of interpretation with a number of references and allusions, of devices such as the ‘picture within a picture’ like in a game of Chinese boxes, and the Allegories of the Five Senses, which were enormously popular in the seventeenth century, especially in Flanders. For painters, the point of reference for this type of subject were the five panels of the Allegory of the Senses painted from 1617 by Pieter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder for the King of Spain, now preserved in the Museo del Prado. In those same years, Brueghel had led a group of artists in creating a pair of paintings of similar subjects, respectively depicting the Allegories of Taste, Hearing and Touch, and the Allegories of Sight and Smell, acquired in 1618 by the City of Antwerp and donated to the Grand Duke Albrecht and his wife Isabella. These two works were destroyed in a fire in the eighteenth century, but probably due to the success of this type of representation, in collaboration with other artists, Brueghel painted replicas of the two groups of Allegories, and these were taken to Madrid by Isabella of Bourbon by 1636, where they appear in the collections of the royal residence, and are currently conserved – like the series of the Five Senses – in the Museo del Prado. Frans Wouters certainly would have seen all these models, and drawn from them, but also adding his own iconographic variants.