Country Wedding

The bride and groom are both in black. That was what respectable Flemish couples wore around 1612, with the wide starched ruff of the day, and it is the surest way to pick them out of the crowd. The groom leads the men of both families toward the church holding a flower, the sign of the marriage. The bride has stayed back among the women. Behind the procession the village gets as much attention as the ceremony does, with the fields and the trees taking up most of the canvas and the wedding party reduced to a line of dark figures crossing it. The picture has a companion, a wedding banquet presided over by the Archdukes, and the two are recorded hanging together in the royal Alcazar in Madrid from 1666.