Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

90 rustic revels
figure 51. Gillis Mostaert, Country Festival, 1583. Present location
unknown.
example, in Peeter Baltens’s Peasant Kermis with the “Clucht van plaijerwater”
(see Figs. 6, 7). Although one well-dressed couple and their little girl
turn away from the crowd just beneath the makeshift stage, 65 another
group of city people converses with a couple of villagers. Urbanites may
also pursue their own amusements. In his View of the Schelde near Antwerp
of 1587 (Fig. 52), Jacob Grimmer contrasts the country dance and its
bagpipe accompaniment in the right middle distance with the elegant
picnic on the grass in the left foreground, where several couples sing or
dance to the sound of the more refined instruments favored by the upper
classes, lutes and a viola da gamba. Stringed instruments—the harp,
the viol, the lute, and others of their kind—had long been associated with
upper-class entertainment. An English manuscript of the seventeenth