It is likely that this picture forms part of a lost set of the five senses, this picture being the sense of taste, so well represented by a man cutting a piece of hard cheese. The picture is extremely freely painted with the artist making much use of the brown ground on which to add the highlights and the shadows. There has been some damage from abrasion, and the restoration undertaken in 2004 has left these areas of thinness rather than making an attempt to reconstruct them. The dating of Sweerts’ pictures remains problematic but the general fluidity of handling and sfumato effect suggest a date after the artist had left Italy. The year 2000 exhibition catalogue proposed a more detailed chronology than before, placing more pictures in the Brussels period in the late 1650s rather than in the much shorter Amsterdam period. The distinctly Flemish appearance of the painting is emphasised by the possible influence of the early work of Van Dyck in his Heads of Apostles.  A further clue to the possible Brussels period dating comes from the rather similar heads of two old men in the series of twelve etchings of studies of heads dated by the artist, Brussels, 1656.

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