Image source: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain). View source

The Peasant Wedding

Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Renaissance & Mannerism

Artist: Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525–1569)
Date: 1567
Dimensions: 114 x 164 cm
Medium: Oil on oak panel
Location: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria

The Peasant Wedding shows a wedding feast held in a barn, its walls stacked with sheaves of grain. Guests crowd around a long table while two men carry in bowls of porridge or custard on an unhinged door used as a tray.

A closer look

The bride sits beaming in front of a green cloth hung on the wall, a paper crown above her head, but the groom is hard to identify; he may be the man pouring beer or not shown at all. Bagpipers play, a child in an oversized cap licks a plate clean in the foreground, and a man in black, perhaps the landowner or a friar, chats at the end of the table. Bruegel observes rural customs with humour and sympathy, building the crowded scene around the strong diagonal of the table.

History of the painting

In 1594 Archduke Ernest of Austria, governor of the Netherlands and a keen collector of Bruegel, acquired the painting in Brussels. After his death it went to his brother, Emperor Rudolf II, and it has remained in the Habsburg collections ever since, today in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, which holds the world’s largest group of Bruegel’s paintings.

More by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

About this artist →