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The Wedding Dance (30.374)
c. 1566
(Pieter Bruegel the Elder)
Curator's Comments This famous painting shows a lively outdoor party celebrating a peasant wedding. Most of the guests are enjoying themselves, with the exception of a mysterious figure in the shadows at the right edge of the painting. The artist disregarded the more realistic style of painting popular in his time: his peasants appear flat and caricatured. Contributing to the effect, for modern viewers, is the actual thinness of the paint, partly a result of chemical changes in the paint over time. In many areas, the see-through quality of the paint makes visible the artist’s initial drawing on the panel, called an underdrawing.
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