Pieter Bruegel the Elder - The peasant wedding

• Title: The peasant wedding
• Artist: Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1527-1569)
• Date: 1567
• Medium: Oil on panel
• Dimensions: 114 x 164 cm

“The Peasant Wedding” is a genre painting, one of Bruegel’s many paintings depicting peasant life. The wedding feast is in a barn in the summertime. The main food is bread, porridge and soup, carried around by two big fellows on a door taken off its hinges.

The bride is sitting in the middle at the table, in front of the green textile wall-hanging with a paper-crown hung above her head. She is also wearing a crown on her loose hair whereas all other characters are wearing a hat or a hood. She is sitting passively with her eyes shut, with her hands together and a blissful smile, maybe praying for a good-married life.

The groom is not immediately obvious. Is he the man in the center of the painting, wearing a dark coat? Or the man handing the plates of food to his guests from the near end of the table, wearing a red cap? Or the man standing in the foreground in the left corner pouring out beer (notice the large basket full of empty jars)? He is wearing a green coat, a connection to the bride’s background. Also, this man’s position in the ainting forms a central diagonal with the bride sitting backwards, a diagonal that crosses the other natural diagonal which is the table, hence increasing the feeling of volume.