Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 'The Peasant Wedding' (1567) stages a village wedding banquet inside a barn, with two servants ferrying a makeshift tray piled with plates of rice pudding across the canvas on their way to the long table. The bride, paper crown and all, sits shyly beneath a green textile; the groom is tellingly absent, a riddle that has occupied commentators for centuries. Painted with near-ethnographic precision — costume, food, musicians, barn construction — it is the pinnacle of Flemish peasant genre painting and one of Bruegel's most reproduced images.

Exhibition Venue

Kunsthistorisches Museum

Vienna, Austria