Follow us on Twitter

End Notes 
Bruegel’s Peasant Wedding Feast

To return to your place in the text, simply press your Back button
  1. The painting is also known as Peasant Wedding
  2. It is possible that some of the browns may originally have been bluer. This fading could have happened if Bruegel used smalt, a violet blue pigment that was popular at the time, but later discovered to be unstable and given to breaking down: Nancy Kenney, “Science illuminates art in Detroit’s celebration of Bruegel’s The Wedding Dance, The Art Newspaper, 10 December 2019 https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/science-illuminates-art-in-detroit-s-celebration-of-bruegel-s-wedding-dance
  3. Karel van Mander, Schilder-boek (1604)
  4. Alpers, Svetlana. "Bruegel's Festive Peasants" in Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 6, no. 3/4 (1972) at 167. Accessed July 12, 2021. doi:10.2307/3780341.
  5. Elke Oberthaler and others, Bruegel the Master. Thames & Hudson (2018) at 262
  6. Alpers, op cit at 165; Oberthaler, op cit at 261
  7. Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen, “The barn is full – time for a wedding!”, in What Great Paintings Say, Vol 1, Taschen, Koln, 2003 at 177
  8. Oberthaler, op cit at 265
  9. Alpers, op cit at 167
  10. Oberthaler, op cit at 265
  11. Hagen, op cit at 181
  12. Alpers, op cit at 168
  13. Oberthaler, op cit at 261
  14. Timothy Foote and eds, The World of Bruegel, Time Life International (Nederland) 1971 at 135, citing Gilbert Highet
  15. Yet another view is that the bridegroom is the somewhat befuddled-looking man sitting at the table, eating with a spoon, three to the bride’s right
  16. See for example, Alexander Wied, Bruegel, Bay Books, Sydney, 1979, at 173
  17.  See for example Hagen, op cit at 177 
  18.  Claudine Majzels, "The Man with Three Feet" in Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Peasant Wedding, Canadian Art Review 27, No 1/2 (2000) 46
  19. Walter S Gibson, “Some notes on Pieter Bruegel’s Peasant Wedding Feast”, Art Quarterly 28 (1965) 196; Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter, University of California Press, 2006
  20. It has also been argued that the painting is an allegory of the church abandoned by Christ, or that the work is Bruegel’s version of the Last Supper, or that it refers to the biblical marriage at Cana, where Christ turned water into wine and vessels were perpetually filled up; see Hagen, op cit at 177
  21.  The spoon has alternatively been interpreted as a symbol of poverty: Hagen, op cit at 179. A similar spoon appears in the hat of the main male dancer in Bruegel’s Peasant Dance (1568)
  22.  A similar feather appears on the hat of the man sitting next to the bagpiper in Bruegel’s Peasant Dance (1568)
  23.  Wied, op cit at 174
  24.  Foote, op cit at 114
  25.  Oberthaler, op cit at 262
  26.  Codpieces emerged to solve the problem that men’s tights simply went to the top of the leg, and did not cover the groin
  27.  Oberthaler, op cit at 262; TM Richardson, Pieter Bruegel the Elder: art discourse in the sixteenth-century Netherlands, Doctoral Thesis, 2007 Leiden University Scholarly Publications at 91 (fig 31)
  28. Also known as Peasant Wedding Dance
  29.  Kenney, op cit
  30.  Oberthaler, op cit at 262; Richardson, op cit at 91 (fig 32) 
© Philip McCouat 2021
​RETURN TO HOME