Pieter Balten (Assigned to)

Provenance: private Italian collection.

In Flanders, village feasts took place to celebrate Saints Days to whom churches and the country’s town and village guilds were dedicated. These feasts were...

Provenance: private Italian collection.

In Flanders, village feasts took place to celebrate Saints Days to whom churches and the country’s town and village guilds were dedicated. These feasts were always accompanied by religious processions but also by theatrical shows, games and archery competitions.

Here, the village square, which lies at the heart of the feast, is seen from above. This procedure allowed Pieter Balten to linger over a myriad of episodes. Grouped together in this way, they constitute a summary of the celebrations and allow more than a hundred characters to be presented in the same painting. The dominant red of the clothes, typical in Balten’s works, adds to the rhythm of the whole, reinforcing the effect of joyous excitement that emanates from the paintings of the master.

The work illustrates the feast of Saint George, as indicated on the inn’s banner in the background on which the Saint appears in armour. After crossing the village, the arrival of the procession’s particularly picturesque group at the church gives the signal for the start of the festivities and the chaos of the villagers as they play, tussle, dance, drink and feast. Couples dance a lively farandole to the sound of the bagpipes, with a joyous mix of men and women. As is often the case in these types of paintings, the atmosphere is far more joyous than disciplined. Couples mischievously cling to one another and embrace. Close to the sensitivity of Brueghel, this painter’s scenes of village feasts would be incomplete without his erotic allusions. In front of Saint George’s inn and in the big barn, a busy crowd shares food and drink. Many of them are rather tipsy and even drunk. A man who has made himself sick with drink, rolls around on the ground at the foot of the dancers who pay no attention to him whatsoever. It is interesting to note that the open-air theatre surrounded by a crowd of onlookers is not relegated to the back of the painting, as was the custom; instead, it is placed at the centre of the painting. They are playing the eternal farce of the cuckolded husband to the delight of the villagers.

Directly inspired by one of the most beautiful Brueghelian village feasts we have ever had in our possession (1), Pieter Balten’s work is particularly impressive owing to the dynamism and size of the painting. By painting village feasts such as these, he ranks alongside Pieter Brueghel and Martin van Cleve as a specialist in the genre, which he marked with his particular trait of portraying gaiety and casualness, peasant humour and the simple life across the ages.

                    
(1) Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Village feast with theatre and procession, exhibited at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge as well as another version currently exhibited at the Royal Museums of Fine Art in Brussels.

1525 – Antwerp – 1598

Pieter Balten registered as a master with the Antwerp guild in 1540, eleven years earlier than Pieter Brueghel the Elder. He had already worked with Pieter Brueghel on the...