A Boy with a Dog (Allegory of "Taste")

About this work

At first glance, this looks like a typical seventeenth-century everyday scene featuring children at play. However, this painting is actually an allegory, a visualisation of an abstract concept. In this case we are looking at an allegory of the sense of taste, part of a series featuring all five senses. The painting was presumably created after Keilhau had set himself up as an artist in Rome in 1656, where he became known under the name of Monsú Bernardo. The road that led him there had been long and winding, taking Keilhau to Rembrandt’s workshop and to Hendrick Uylenburgh’s academy of painting in Amsterdam. Keilhau grew up in Kronborg Castle in Elsinore, where his mother was a housekeeper to the court and his father, Caspar Kegelhoff, was court artist to Christian IV and Frederik III.