YCBA Collections Search

This work is from a series representing the five senses; the other subjects-also in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art-are sight, smell, taste, and touch. In each painting a group of four or five people, generally young, attractive, and flirtatious, act out a scene involving the given sense: music-making for hearing; looking into a mirror and through a telescope and magnifying glass for sight; sniffling flowers and a melon for smell; eating and drinking at a banquet for taste; embracing and being scratched by a cat for touch. Mercier took more or less all of these ideas from long-established iconographic traditions, the chief models being paintings and engravings by seventeenth-century artists working in the Low Countries. As a painter whose sensibilities were rooted in the French Rococo, and especially in the work of Watteau, he imparted to three of his senses-smell, taste, and touch-the look of fêtes galantes, with young men and women clearly pairing off and amorous possibilities in the air. His casting in the scenes for hearing and sight is less predictable. Although both feature young women, the males in the sight subject are an old man and a boy, and in The Sense of Hearing the characters are all female. But even when removed from the image, the male presence remains-in the person of the assumed viewer, with whom the beautiful harpsichordist makes titillating eye contact. Mercier's interest in all the senses was largely in sensual pleasure and, with the present work, in music as the food of love.
If not musically, then certainly as far as beauty and grace are concerned, the elderly lady playing the cello and the girls playing the flute and violin are the harpsichordist's mere accompaniment. Mercier paints the immature looks of the girls, presumably her younger sisters, in passages of looser, duller brushwork that make them seem all the more unformed; by contrast the harpsichordist's features are both fine in themselves and finely painted, set off by touches of sparkle in the eyes and the earring. The elderly lady is also loosely painted. It is difficult to guess what relation she may be to the others, but certainly she appears in the role of the chaperone, severely dressed and placed close to the viewer in a slightly barrier-like way. Even the instruments seem distributed according to how fetching they are: whereas the harpsichordist is free to look alluringly out at us, the flautist puffs her cheeks, the violinist cranes her neck, and the elderly lady holds her cello, inevitably with a hint of the indecorous, between her knees.
The scores on the harpsichord are marked "Hendel Operas" and "Geminiani's Sonates." Both the German-born George Frideric Handel and the Italian violinist and composer Francesco Geminiani were living in London at this time, and Mercier-as a foreigner striving for success in the British art world-may well have chosen these names to make a point: if foreigners could take the lead in music in Britain, why should not foreign painters, such as he, take the lead in art? More particularly, it seems at least possible that the rather unusual combination of instruments comes from Geminiani's instructional Rules for Playing in a True Taste on the Violin, German Flute, Violoncello and Harpsichord… Exemplify'd in a Variety of Compositions on the Subjects of English, Scotch and Irish Tunes, which was issued in parts from about 1739 to about 1745.
Mercier painted his series of the senses in the 1740s while living in York. The paintings are difficult to date exactly and may have been done over a protracted period, which might explain the differences in technique between the hearing and sight subjects on the one hand, and the smell, taste, and touch subjects on the other. The date given above seems reasonable for the present work since a reproductive mezzotint by John Faber was published, under the ungainly title of Musical Family Concert of Ladies, in 1744. According to the diarist George Vertue, the artist brought the whole series with him to London in 1747 and sold them for £100.1.

Malcolm Warner

Julia Marciari-Alexander, This other Eden, paintings from the Yale Center for British Art , Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1998, pp. 48-49, no. 12, ND1314.3 Y36 1998 (YCBA)