Wedding Feast on a Village Green

Depicting peasant weddings as well as other amusements of common villagers took a firm place in Netherlandish art during the 16th-17th centuries. An increased interest in the life and customs of peasants emerged with the Great Peasants’ War (1524-1525) which affected a great part of today’s Germany. Therefore, prior to the mid-16th century, depictions of peasants were mainly spread via prints by German artists (esp. Barthel and Sebald Beham) while contemporary poetry and pamphlets explained the meaning of largely satirical depictions. Prints and literary works facilitated the subsequent spreading of the “peasant genre” in the Netherlands where Pieter Bruegel the Elder and his many followers including Maerten van Cleve further spread it. Van Cleve was believed to be the artist of the Prague panel; only the recent dendrochronological analysis evidenced that the painting could have been made as late as the early 17th century when Maerten was long dead. Maerten van Cleve’s style was spread by his four sons, also painters, which suggests that they (or one of them) could be behind this panel.