The painting shows a variety of country folk celbrating a wedding by having a midday meal. Most of it is clear enough. One one level it is straightforward, amusing, sympathetic and easy to understand. For instance, right in the foreground, closest to the onlooker , a small girl about three years old sits on the floor eating from a plate with her finger and sucking the finger clean. She is dressed in ugly dark thick Flemish clothes,with plenty of petticoats and sturdy little boots, but she has a gallant peacock feather stuck in her hat because she has been taken to a party. These are simple, decent, people.
Bruegel. The Peasant Wedding. www.all-art.org ''The painting, now measuring 114 x 163 cm, is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. It is neither signed nor dated. The signature and date were probably on the bottom section of the original oak panel, which was sawn off and replaced at a later date. The craftsmanship of the more recent section is noticeably poorer. Experts think Bruegel painted the work c. 1567. He married in 1563 and died in 1569, aged about 40. The Peasant Wedding Feast was therefore executed during his short marriage, shortly before his death.''
The emotional tone of the painting is predominantly peaceful and harmonious. It is occasionally discussed together with Bruegel’s ”Peasant Dance” as though the two paintings expressed a similar spirit, as if Bruegel was doing Norman Rockwell covers for the Saturday Evening Post. That is a mistake. They make a sharp contrast. The dancers are excited, ungainly, rather drunk, their jollification coarse and boorish; even the composition of the group in involved and turbulent. But the ”Wedding” is sedate. It is built on a long smooth diagonal extending right across the picture; the table prolonged by the tray in the immediate foreground. On each side of the table sit the guests, eating and drinking purposefully but in the main quietly. Their arrangement is orderly.
At the extreme right are a man of distinction and a friar; at the extreme left, the humblest villagers, not even at table but gathered outside. No one is drunk. No one is dancing or even smiling. Most of the guests look stodgy but not unpleasant, and of the three faces in the foreground, two are decent, calm and honest. This point is important because some critics commenting on the picture interpret it as a clear denunciation of coarse vices.
'' For Bruegel's contemporaries it would have been immediately obvious why the monk in the painting converses with the only wedding guest who might be construed as an aristocrat. The spoon attached to a waiter's hat was a sign of poverty. Since the abolition of serfdom and, its corollary, the obligation of feudal lords to maintain their serfs' welfare, the rural proletariat had greatly increased in number. Peasants with no property or means took whatever work they could find, harvesting, threshing, even assisting on festive occasions. Most lived in huts and were unmarried; wages were not enough to feed a family. Few had a fixed abode, for they spent too long on the road in search of work, a crust of bread or a bowl of meal. This explains the spoon attached to the man's hat, and his bag, of which - in the present work - only the shoulder-strap is visible. The wooden spoon is round. Oval spoons came later, when - following the example of the courts - it was thought bad manners to open one's mouth too wide while eating. To put something into one's mouth with a fork was practically unknown in the 16th century. The alternatives to the spoon were fingers or a knife. Everyone carried their own knife; even the child in the foreground has one dangling from his belt. No instrument features more often in Bruegel's paintings - the knife was the 16th-century all-purpose tool.''
C.G. Stridbeck saw the bagpipes as a symbol of Sin, the wooden spoons as a symbol of Gluttony, and the little girl as a greedy guzzler. Without observing the complete difference of ethos, he compared tis calm respectable scene with a contemporary picture of a Beggar’s Banquet in which the ragged guests are voraciously dissecting a roast pig, and a man in the immediate foreground, turning away from the table to face the spectator, is vomiting on the ground. No. There are a few jarring notes in the ”Peasant Wedding” , but in the main the people are quiet and decorous. They may be dull but they are not besotted and vicious. Bruegel portrayed gluttony in a wonderfully comic engraving of a ”Fat Kitchen” ( 1563 ) full of hams and sausages and plump cheeks and bulging bellies; nothing could be less like the ”Peasant Wedding”.
The central problematic of the picture is that although the bride is prominent, as she should be at her wedding, it is not easy to find the bridegroom. Bruegel placed the bride in the middle distance, but signalized her with perfect clarity. He set her head, the only bare head at the table, against a large cloth hung on the wall; emphasized it by hanging a bridal crown above it, and carried the spectator’s eye toward her by the active gesture of the young man distributing food in the foreground. But the bridegroom does not appear to be accentuated in this way, and the experts have always differed about his identity, even about his presence.
''It is to this Italian that we owe the most interesting account of the Netherlands in the 16th century. In his own country, as in Spain, drunkenness was considered disgraceful, and Guicciardini conseqeuently castigates the "vice and abuse of drunkenness". According to his observations, the Netherlanders drank "night and day, and so much that, besides creating disorder and mischief, it does them great harm in more ways than one". As a southerner, unused to the north, he found an excuse for their behaviour: the climate. The air was "damp and melancholy", and "they had found no better means" of driving away their weather-induced melancholia. There is no sign of drunkenness in this painting, however. Indeed, the mood seems comparatively sober; an Italian may even have found it melancholy. Nonetheless, the mood would no doubt change as the meal progressed, or during the celebrations, which could last anything up to several days. Bruegel's Peasant Wedding Dance (Institute of Arts, Detroit), 1566, a painting of almost identical format, shows the guests in a frenzy of drunken revelry. The two paintings could almost be a pair.''
Gustav Gluck confessed his own perplexity at the absence. Baron Joseph van der Elst, in ”The last Flowering of the Middle Ages” commented: ” There is an old Flemish proverb: It is a poor man who is not able to be at his own wedding’ , That seems to be gthe case here.” Bruegel oved proverbs, but it is doubtful he would paint such a large and complex picture in order to illustrate such a weak little adage, which is after all a simple hyperbole like ”Its a poor heart that never rejoices”. Besides, it is not a poor man’s wedding. The family may not be rich , but they have ample food and drink and hospitality and can afford to pay two pipers. K.C. Lindsay suggested that the bridegroom is absent because the painting symbolizes ecclesiastical corruption. ”The fleshy Bride, given to the world, conspicuously lacks her bridegroom”. Meaning the peasant girl represents the Church and the absent groom corresponds to Jesus Christ.
Linday’s interpretation is clever, even ingenious, but is only borderline plausibly convincing; mainly because the tranquil mood of the picture does not suggest, at its first or hundred and first viewing, that the painter intended it as a denunciation of a mighty spiritual discord comparable to ”Piers Plowman”
''The bride, backed by green fabric, a bridal crown hovering above her head, is easily distinguished. She presents a strange sight: her eyes semi-closed, hands quite st
she is completely motionless. Brides were expected to do nothing on their wedding days; forbidden to lift a finger, she was thus guaranteed at least one holiday in a lifetime of hard labour. A person who avoided work was sometimes referred to as having "arrived with the bride". The nobleman, or wealthy burgher, at the right of the painting is the only other guest with his hands folded. He, too, was a stranger to physical labour, it seems.''
The bridegroom must be in the picture. If we can find him, perhaps reluctant as he may have been to get hitched, we should be able to understand more of his significance. It is worth remembering that Bruegel was never bashful about telling stories in his paintings; in fact the literary and narrative qualities of his work unfolds with as many rich details and any modern novelist. Some of his pictures take as long to read, and are as full of social commentary, as a book by Balzac or the profundity of a Voltaire. Bruegel meant his spectators to study the spiritual meaning both of the details and of the ensemble in each picture.
''Painters who idealized people as beautiful or cerebral beings did not depict them eating -no spoon or bite to eat on its way mouthwards was visible; instead, people sat chatting in front of their plates. Quite the opposite was true in the case of Bruegel, who emphasized the material existence of people, showing the body's need of nourishment.''
Bruegel would scarcely have understood why anyone except a student should devote an entire painting to a few apples in a bowl, however distorted and discolored. His intricate narratives were his way of creating movement in a painting, of lifting the work above the limitations of dimensionality inherent in the medium. However, the meaning of his pictures are not known to be platitudes. There is nothing like ”The Gamblers Wife” or ”The Doctor” . His ”Peasant Wedding” is not a nice, simple, E Flat Major ceremony, like Carl Goldmark’s symphony of the same name. Bruegel loved exploring contrasts and developing discords.
”Bruegel’s bride is seated in the midst of the gathering. But where is the groom? That is the mystery of this painting; it has been asked by critics these 400 years. Walter Gibson writes: “Unlike the bride, the groom cannot be readily distinguished, and writers have exercised considerable ingenuity in explaining his supposed absence.”
Peasant Dance. ''No painter before him had dared produce such works. Contemporary art generally regarded peasants as figures of mockery, considering them stupid, gluttonous, drunken, and prone to violence. It is as such that they appear in satirical poems, tales, and Shrovetide plays: as a well-known negative type, an object of laughter. They were used by authors to amuse the reader, and also to warn him to beware of bad qualities and wrong behaviour.''
Several men have been proposed as candidates — the man on the left pouring out beer, or one of the other men serving the food, in keeping with the custom of the time where the husband was supposed to wait upon the wife’s family during the banquet. But why didn’t Bruegel make his particular identity unmistakable? Addressing this question in a seminar presented at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, Aesthetic Realism consultant and artist Dorothy Koppelman said:
“The world,” Eli Siegel [explains], “is the third partner” necessary in any marriage. Bruegel’s ‘Peasant Wedding’ is an exemplification of the Aesthetic Realism idea.” And she said, “The Bruegel ‘Peasant Wedding’ is the wedding of a person to the world.” I believe this is true. And seeing it thrilled me. In one of my first Aesthetic Realism consultations I learned the reason my marriage had ended. My consultants said to me: You thought you could love a person but you didn’t love the world. You didn’t feel the way you saw a person depended on the way you saw the world. … It is thought Bruegel himself is the man in black with the red beard seated at the far right on an upturned washtub, engaged in conversation with a monk.
This intimate, serious conversation between two people is balanced in the composition by the crowd of people streaming in at the door. I think Bruegel’s message is: in order to have the true intimacy and depth of feeling people hope for in marriage, the world in all its variety must be welcomed. I love this painting and I see it as a visual affirmation of what Eli Siegel explains in his lecture “The Furious Aesthetics of Marriage”:You cannot love a person, whether that person is called Ned or Edwina, is called Winnie or Jimmy, is called Edgar or Frieda — you cannot love a person unless you want to love the world, as a large and unlimited fact…. Our purpose, our most constant purpose, the purpose of purposes, and the purpose of purposes of purposes is: To like the world on an exact basis, which is also beautiful.” ( Ruth Oron )
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