The Peasant Wedding
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (about 1525 to 1569) · about 1567
A wedding feast is under way in a barn stacked to the rafters with straw. Along a long table sit the guests, and in the middle, under a paper crown hung on a green cloth, sits the bride, plump, pink and blissfully doing nothing, with her hands folded and her eyes half closed. Two men carry in bowls of porridge on an unhinged door, a piper stares hungrily at the food as he plays, a child in an oversized red hat licks a plate, and at the doorway a crowd is still pushing in. Notice the bagpipes, the jugs of beer being poured at the left, and the man at the end of the table with a sword and a dog, probably the landlord, in conversation with a friar.
Bruegel did not paint peasants as caricatures but as people at a party. The composition is a long diagonal, from the door in the background down the table to the bowl carriers in the foreground, and it is packed with individual portraits of eating, drinking and listening. Look for the sheaves of grain with a rake stuck into them, which tell you the harvest is in and the season is right for weddings, and for the two crossed sheaves that suggest the couple's future prosperity. The groom is the subject of endless argument; one theory is that he is the man in the dark coat pouring beer, another that by custom he served rather than sat.
The panel was bought in Brussels in 1594 by Archduke Ernst and came to Vienna with the rest of the Habsburg Bruegels. It is one of the most reproduced images of country life ever made, appearing on everything from beer labels to school posters. Bruegel's contemporaries said he dressed as a peasant to attend such feasts uninvited, and whether or not that is true, the painting has the warmth of an eyewitness.
Did You Know? The child in the foreground wears a hat with a peacock feather far too big for him, and is entirely absorbed in licking his bowl.
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