The community of Leiden, The Netherlands, and the Leiden Lakenhal Museum purchased a painting by Rembrandt, the earliest known painting by the Dutch master.
The Lakenhal Museum, the city’s art museum in Leiden, is housed in the former cloth hall from 1640.
Rembrandt painted the picture “The glasses salesman” (1623-1624) at the age of about 17 years in his native city Leiden, the cradle of Dutch paintings in the 17th century.
“The glasses salesman” is already showing the distinctive artistic characteristics with which Rembrandt (Leiden, July 15, 1606 – Amsterdam, October 4, 1669) was later to become famous: the contrasts between light and dark, loose brush strokes, and the life-like heads of the main characters. The painting was originally part of a series of five small paintings with the theme of the Five Senses. Two of the three remaining preserved paintings (“Feeling” and “Listening”) are located in a private collection in New York. The third piece (“Seeing”) is now maintained as a Dutch cultural heritage.
The theme of the Five Senses plays an important role in the Dutch printmaking and painting. The Five Senses have been represented in a characteristic, but for us not always understandable way . The allegories used for showing the Five Senses were diverse, and sometimes – at least in our eyes – far-fetched.
E. de Jongh wrote in his book about the importance of the Dutch genre paintings from the seventeenth century:
“From ancient times to the 17th century much has been written about the senses, especially in disapproving words. The senses have been condemned as unreliable not only in the teachings of Plato; also other philosophical systems have considered perception – and indeed all forms of perception – to be illusory. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance the senses were treated from a Christian point of view as the ways in which evil and sin invaded the human spirit. During the 17th century, however, this distrustful attitude changed under the influence of the developing empiricism, which sought to establish all knowledge in experience. This philosophical movement treated the senses not as sin, but as a facilitator of information and evidence.”
“Numerous versions of the Five Senses have been produced by artists in the Northern Netherlands during the early decades of the seventeenth century.
In the early decades of the seventeenth century, artists in Haarlem and Amsterdam began to favor depicting middle- or lower-class figures enacting the sense perception narratively, rather than suggesting the subject symbolically.
The young Rembrandt was among the artistic innovators who painted a series of small panels depicting the Five Senses (c. 1624-1625). In Rembrandt’s case, groups of three primary figures representing lower-class social types are portrayed engaged in a sense-related activity—figures sing in Hearing, undergo a procedure to remove the proverbial ‘stone of Folly’ in Touch, and purchase spectacles in Sight.
Rembrandt’s figures are absorbed in their actions and take little notice of the viewer.”
