in the seventeenth century, series paintings such as the four seasons and five senses tend to be created by Flemish rather than Dutch masters. There’s at least one notable exception, which also includes some of the most overt visual humour of the Dutch Golden Age, painted by Jan Miense Molenaer (c 1610-1668).

Molenaer seems to have spent much of his life in Haarlem, where he’s thought to have been an apprentice of Frans Hals. Other than marrying a fellow apprentice, Judith Leyster, in 1836, and the couple moving their shared studio to Amsterdam for eleven years, little seems known about his life.

The Dentist, painted in 1630, is one of his earlier paintings, and declares his interest in everyday life. A small crowd has gathered outside a church, where a fashionably dressed man is pulling a tooth from a local. The victim is dressed in tatters, with large holes at both his knees and worn-out shoes. Most around him have their hands clasped in prayer, presumably that the victim doesn’t break free and hit his dentist.

Several of Molenaer’s surviving paintings show the making of music, including A Young Man playing a Theorbo and a Young Woman playing a Cittern from about 1630-32. This is set in the interior of an upper middle class home, with a maid serving a meal in the right background. A theorbo is a member of the lute family, and is plucked, while a cittern has metal strings and is more like an ancestor of the guitar.

Several musical instruments also feature in his Allegory of Vanity from 1633, one of his vanitas paintings. An older woman is passing a fine-tooth comb through the long tresses of a younger woman, to check and remove parasites like lice. She is holding a mirror, and resting a foot on a human skull rather than a foot-warmer. The conventional lapdog is replaced by a golden statue, and the young boy in front of her is holding a device used to make bubbles. The woman’s jewellery is on display on a table at the right, and her make-up shown in a dressing table on the left.

Molenaer painted many scenes inside taverns and other places where drinking and gambling took place. His Card Players by Lamplight from about 1634 shows a card game in progress by the light of a lamp mounted on a stand in the foreground. The player looking directly at the viewer clearly thinks he holds the winning ace.

In about 1635, Molenaer painted his family playing music together. Judging by the portraits hanging behind them, the artist is at the extreme left, but his wife Judith Leyster only seems to be shown in her portrait.

Two years later, he painted The Five Senses, relatively small works on panels whose origins are obscure. Most series like these are commissioned, as the chances of finding a purchaser for the whole series are low. These appear to have been completed when he was in Amsterdam, and were only purchased for the Mauritshuis in 1893.

Sight is one of the more straightforward to read, with a man gazing wistfully into an empty flask by the light of the lamp on the table in front of him.

Hearing is more of an allusion, as three men carouse noisily over a mug of drink.

Taste stays in the same drinking room, as one man savours the last drop of drink, while another lights his pipe from the hot embers in a small earthenware container.

Touch is rich in ribald humour. The man on the left has thrust his left hand up to grope inside the woman’s skirts, for which she is about to bring her slipper down forcefully on his head.

Smell completes the series with the best of his visual jokes. The woman on the right is cleaning up the bum of the infant on her lap. This also shows severe fading on her skirt, which was painted using indigo with lead white. The original was far darker, as can be seen by the deeper blue at the edge of the panel, where the frame has shielded the pigment from light.

Although Molenaer continued to paint prolifically, this series marks his zenith, with fine examples of genre paintings during the Dutch Golden Age.