The Wedding Feast: a fragment

Details

Studio of Pieter Brueghel II (Brussels 1564/5-1637/8 Antwerp)
The Wedding Feast: a fragment
oil on panel
39.9 x 48.8 cm.

Provenance

Anonymous sale; Galerie Giroux, Brussels, 12 March 1927, lot 16, as from a collection in Ghent, along with two other fragments presumably from the same picture sold during the same sale.

Literature

G. Marlier, Pierre Brueghel le Jeune, Brussels, 1969, p. 210, no. 18.
K. Ertz, Pieter Brueghel der Jüngere (1564-1637/38), Lingen, 2000, II, p. 716, no. E 892, fig. 892.

Special notice

Christie's charges a Buyer's premium calculated at 23.205% of the hammer price for each lot with a value up to €110,000. If the hammer price of a lot exceeds €110,000 then the premium for the lot is calculated at 23.205% of the first €110,000 plus 11.9% of any amount in excess of €110,000. Buyer's Premium is calculated on this basis for each lot individually.

Lot Essay

As with many paintings by Pieter Brueghel II, this work is thought to derive from the oeuvre of his father, Pieter Bruegel I (see Marlier, op. cit., p. 205). It would apear, however, that for this compositional type there is no single prototype, but that instead it is a combination of motifs: many of the figures coming from the Pieter I composition of The wedding dance in the open recorded by an engraving by Pieter van der Heyden, and the setting inspired by the former's celebrated Wedding Dance in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, grouped together and then embellished by Pieter II himself. Signed versions of the composition by Pieter II include that sold at Christie's, New York, 9 June 1978, lot 87A, and the signed and dated picture of 1620 in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.

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