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DESCRIPTION:
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A decisive event in the life of the common man of the 16th century, and as such, a favourite subject of the Renaissance humanists in Flanders, such scenes were given their paradigmatic form by Brueghel the Elder, his son, and his followers. The peasant wedding was illustrated in a variety of ways : with the notable exception of the sacrament itself, all of the different rituals that such celebrations involved, from the wedding procession to the wedding night, not to mention the wedding banquets and dances, were detailed with verve and gusto by the Brueghel dynasty and their imitators. In this case, it is a very specific moment that is being depicted: the bride, surrounded by her family, is receiving the line of guests who have come to present their wedding gifts.
Although the motif of the bride seated before a dish of hard currency, which appears in the engraving by P.Van der Heyden after Brueghel the Elder (although combined with an Outdoor Wedding Dance there), is recycled by his son in the Wedding Dance in an Interior, which, however, shows the procession of guests offering their gifts in kind, it would seem that the first independent and autonomous formulation of this theme was actually by Maerten van Cleve (cf. Ertz, op. cit., pp. 641, 705, fig. 514, cat. N° A843).
The fairly similar treatment by Pieter the Younger is however distinguished by a simplification that allows the artist to improve the legibility of the composition and to concentrate on the expressiveness of the main characters. The bride is seated beneath a makeshift canopy made of a red cloth suspended between two trees. Her hair hangs loose, as a symbol of her virginity, and she wears the traditional wedding crown. With an ambiguous expression combining interest with a touch of melancholy, she regards the pile of money before her, which is just being augmented by a couple of guests. These funds, assiduously recorded by a figure dressed in black (her father, or perhaps more likely, a trustworthy fellow assigned to the task), will serve to compensate her parents for the cost of the festivities. Guests throng about them on both sides, carrying pieces of furniture and other household items intended for the use of young newlyweds. Stools, a bellows, a spinning wheel, a basket, and on a humorous note, a chamber pot, provide a colourful glimpse of the trousseau for a young peasant bride of decent means at the turn of the 16th and 17th century.
This composition is one of the three signed versions of this subject in a rustic setting. A more middle-class variation on the theme combines the motif of the ceremony of the cash gifts with the dance performed by unmarried women known catherinettes, all of which takes place within a barn. The bride's higher social status is indicated by her elegant clothing and demeanor, and correspondingly, the gifts of furniture and crude utensils are absent.
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