Market Scene

By the 1560s Aertsen was back in Amsterdam, painting the people who sold food in the markets. A man and a woman come right up to the front edge. She holds up a bunch of dead birds, he has a wicker cage of poultry under his arm and she carries a basket at her side, and both look straight at us as if waiting for a price. Scenes of vendors and food were ranked low at the time. Aertsen gave them big, solid, turning bodies he had learned from Italian art, the kind of figure usually reserved for saints and heroes. Behind them a street of brick houses runs back, with two women carrying baskets. The painting was recorded at Prague Castle in 1685, and it came to Vienna from Prague in 1723.