Netherlandish Proverbs

When this canvas was painted in 1627, the picture on it was already 68 years old. Pieter Bruegel the Elder had made the original in 1559, a village crammed with people acting out more than a hundred Dutch sayings, and it hangs today in Berlin. His son repeated the design at least 16 times, and no two versions show quite the same set of proverbs. Near the centre a woman drapes a blue cloak over her husband, the old expression for a wife deceiving him, which once gave the whole composition its name. Elsewhere a man urinates at the moon, aiming at the impossible, a lamb stands meek among the crowd, and bears are made to dance. Every saying shows what people should not do, and some of them are still heard in Dutch today.