Flemish Fair, Jan Brueghel de Oude

Flemish Fair, Jan Brueghel de Oude

This magnificent landscape (in perfect condition) depicts a Kermis or fair, during which a religious festival is celebrated by a rustic street party. The subject had been treated by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, in his Peasant Dance of c.1568 as a Vanity Fair of drink-fuelled folly and vice. Jan Brueghel by contrast sees the Kermis as an emblem of the happiness of a well-ordered society at play. He adopts his father's technique, of the universal panorama of life, with as many legible mini-incidents as space and ingenuity permit. This small copper is an inexhaustible record of life, which its original owner must have spent many hours reading. In the background bystanders kneel before the religious procession approaching the church. The pub in the left background is full; amongst many groups we can just make out a ring of peasants playing dice on a tree-stump table. In the middle ground two groups of peasants dance in a ring to the sound of bagpipes and hurdy-gurdy; a pair of children are trying to learn the same moves. One elderly woman in the near group has a ring of keys held on a cord, which flies out from her waist as she spins. Behind the nearer ring to the right there is a toy-seller (who has recently sold a hobbyhorse), a beggar or peddler in red talking to a man and his wife who appear to be in biblical fancy dress. The festivities are enjoyed by two groups of prosperous middle-class observers: one group of gallant young lovers (in the