COLLECTION DETAILS

This work is obviously copied after his father's famous painting with the same title (Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien). It is said that there are five copies of his father’s made by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, of which three pieces are indoor scenes faithful to the original, and the other two, including this one, are modified to outdoor scenes, with the size reduced to less than half of the original. It is considered that because of the small number of his father’s paintings and also of the high demands of his father's works whose popularities remained high even in the later years, he could have copied his father's works freely. Same as the original, this painting depicts in the right foreground the two men who are carrying a kind of puddings on plates, a dessert referred to as ‘vlaai’ in Dutch and peculiar to Flanders, using a catering board made of door planks. A young woman with long hair who is wearing a crown and black ceremonial robe and is sitting under the green curtain is a bride. Other women are wrapping their hairs with something like white headscarf. The women sitting at each side of the bride are respectively her mother and mother-in-law. It is inferred that the three men sitting on the left side of the bride are, from the man right next to the bride, her father or notary, followed by the Franciscan friar and a lord or head of the village or a judge. On the opposite side are two bagpipers standing, one of who is in red clothes is gazing at the delicious foods and forgetting playing a bagpipe. So where is the groom? According to the customs at the time, a groom had a role to serve guests, and therefore, the groom could be a man in brown on the right who is picking up and placing puddings on the table, or a man in black on the bottom left corner who is pouring beer into a mug. Or, there is another view that the groom probably is not depicted here and will appear soon. The appearance of the young man who is pouring beer into a mug can remind viewers of The Wedding at Cana, which is the theme of the Christian art. The allegory of wine in The Wedding at Cana is surely hidden in the element of a man pouring a drink during the wedding banquet, but even so, the drink in this painting should be beer. According to one opinion, the man pouring beer and the child who is sitting near him and licking the pudding plate are father and son. Some regard this as an allegory meaning the moral “Like father, like son” or the Dutch proverb “The bottle will always be stuffed with those things put in at first,” which means “The habits at childhood hardly change.” The yellow leaves on the background represent the arrival of autumn. For Flemish farmers, a harvest season is followed by a wedding season.