Peasant Dance

Aertsen dated this panel 1550 on the window frame, a year before the young Pieter Bruegel was admitted to the painters' guild in Antwerp. Bruegel's own Peasant Dance, painted around 1567, hangs in the same museum. Here the eye goes first to a gaunt peasant who has turned his head and throws a hard, threatening look out of the picture. Aertsen reused him. He and the two figures beside him turn up almost unchanged in other paintings of his, so they were probably models he kept at hand in the workshop. In front of them lies a fine still life of food and tableware. Through an opening like a window you look into a tavern, a glimpse that would have reminded viewers of the Prodigal Son wasting his inheritance in low company. The monogram is invisible to the eye and shows only under infrared, and the panel was already in the Habsburg collections by 1610.