Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

a bankrupt and his bruegels 69
figure 41. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peasant Wedding Dance, 1566. The
Detroit Institute of Arts, City of Detroit Purchase.
scenes are recorded, among which are three “peasant dances,” three “peasant
kermises,” and five “peasant weddings.” 10 One of these pictures, a
“peasant wedding on linen,” was in the collection of Joris Veselaer,
Noirot’s colleague at the mint, 11 but even so, Noirot’s taste for peasant
subjects was unusual and thus raises some interesting issues that may be
approached by asking this question: why did he hang three of his Bruegel
peasant scenes in his dining room?
Margaret Sullivan, who published a monograph on Bruegel’s two
paintings in Vienna in 1994—a year, incidentally, before the publication
of Noirot’s auction records—oªers one answer to this question. 12 She proposes
that the Vienna panels were painted for a patron in the circle of