Pieter Bruegel the Elder - The Peasant Wedding

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Inspired by Pieter Bruegel the Elder - The Peasant Wedding

Brueghel was well known for his peasant scenes; he was often referred to as ‘Peasant’ Breughel. Through his paintings we came to learn more about village life of the 16th century. Like so many other moralistic genre paintings this is filled with symbolistic references. Here gluttony and poverty stand out, but possibly lack of virginity. The paper crown hung over the bride is in two parts which implies she may already be with child.

Pieter’s son, Brueghel the Younger made a copy of his father’s work, and a couple mysteries appear.  In the elders version, there is an additional foot under the food tray (a door off its hinges). It seems the man in the front of the tray has three feet.

Is this a joke by the painter? Clearly Brueghel the Younger, didn’t think it was funny for in his painting the third foot is eliminated altogether. Another object that went missing is a large codpiece (a leather phallus sheath, cod was slang for scrotum) on the bagpiper. The younger attached this accoutrement to the bagpiper, but Dad’s has gone missing. Through infrared photography they found that senior’s codpiece had been replaced with a black patch. This was not the first time the elder was censored. In his bawdy, The Wedding Dance, several codpieces were removed from the frolicking peasants, only to be discovered during a 1941 restoration. I guess Pieter was not the only one with scruples

See Original: https://bit.ly/3r0aLbF

George Caleb Bingham - The Jolly Flatboatmen

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Inspired by George Caleb Bingham - The Jolly Flatboatmen

Except for three months of study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Bingham was self-taught. He began his career as a portrait painter, which was his money maker all through his career. But where he made his mark was genre painting. He was one of the most important American painters of genre subjects in the 19th century. Working before America’s vastness was made accessible by roads and railways, Bingham found his subjects in the boatmen and trappers who populated the Missouri and the Mississippi, the great rivers of his home state. Through these subjects he captured a taste of life in the West. The Jolly Flatboatmen is from his series depicting life on the river. It is among the first distinctly American paintings that capture the allure of Western expansion during the mid-19th century.Several New York businessmen formed the American Art Union to promote paintings of American scenes by American artists. Every year, the union bought a painting, and held a lottery for their members to decide who took the painting home. They paid Bingham $290 for the Floatmen and gave it to Benjamin van Schaick, a New York city grocer. The total cost to the winner was the $5 he paid for his membership. In 1986 it was sold for $6 million, a record-breaking auction price. The American Art Union produced a large mezzotint that was distributed to its 10,000 members throughout the country, This immediately made it one of the best-known works of art of its era. Some 18,000 were circulated to hang in American homes and places of business. In today’s terms, it went viral.