It is a boisterous scene that greets us. A more than merry procession of villagers return from a fair, apparently still very much in the throes of revelry, with figures dancing to a bagpipe, a couple embracing in a horse drawn cart and a family returning home in the foreground, the child with a hobby horse underarm. The group makes its way down a muddy road riveted with grooves from cartwheels. While most of them dance to the bagpiper’s merry tune, the drink has got to the head of one young man who is propped up against the tree with his head in his lap, while another figure, an older lady, squats behind him to relieve herself in another way. Beyond this cast of principal protagonists the artist has depicted a village scene still bustling with life, the fair seemingly still in full swing: a group of ten figures link hands and dance merrily in circles; two men are on the point of a sword fight as one is withheld by a woman desperately imploring them to desist, herself perhaps the cause of the fracas; beyond them the more sedate activities of organised hockey and archery keep others out of trouble and in the central distance a group of parishioners are filing into or out of church. Brueghel has placed a tree trunk to the right of the revellers to divide the composition into two and in this smaller section we see a far quieter scene, a nearly empty avenue beside a canal populated by just a few couples stumbling home and a cripple begging alms from two women. It is a scene in fact in which one can find any number of narratives and which gives us a clear idea of the spirit of such occasions in early seventeenth-century Flanders.
[Sotheby’s, London - Oil on oak panel, 50 x 79 cm]