The Wedding Banquet

The scholar Klaus Ertz found the painter's own family in this crowd. His wife Katharina is seated with their daughter Anna in her arms, and their son Ambrosius, six years old, stands in the group at the right of the foreground. The scene is the end of a country wedding feast. Guests drink, dance, embrace and carry presents up to the couple, who sit at the back under a red cloth. The village wedding was a stock Flemish subject and it was usually painted as a study in greed and drink. Here the guests are treated gently and the carrying of gifts is what the picture dwells on. The canvas is 269 centimetres wide and reached Madrid in 1623, part of a shipment of Flemish paintings sent to furnish the queen's tower in the Alcazar.