Art: Mystery Story

The majority of people like Saturday Evening Post covers. Some prefer Picasso. But almost everybody can usually agree on Pieter Bruegel, the 16th-Century painter of romping, roughhousing Flemish peasants.

Not even scholars, however, agree on some of Bruegel’s details. The matter of the bridegroom in Bruegel’s Rustic Wedding (see cut), for instance, has long been a matter of high dispute. Which is he? Viennese Scholar Gustav Glük pointed to the glutton seated halfway down the table with the spoon in his mouth, perhaps because he is the only man looking straight out of the canvas. But his unimportant position at the festive board seems to rule him out. Baron van der Elst (The Last Flowering of the Middle Ages) decided that the groom just wasn’t there. He backed up his opinion with an old Flemish proverb: ” ‘It’s a poor man who is not able to eat at his own wedding.’ That seems to be the case here.”

In the November Magazine of Art, Major Gilbert Highet, a former Fellow at St. John’s College, Oxford, and on military leave from Columbia University, thinks he has found the groom. Using the tried-&-true detective method of eliminating suspects, he tracks his man all around the table.

The Setting. The wedding party is in the barn, he reasons, because the farmhouse is too small. Even so, the guests have to stand in line for seats: “Everything is improvised.” For instance, the pie tray is really just a door taken off its hinges.

The bride, sitting with clasped hands and downcast eyes in front of a loosely hung curtain, “is a healthy, blowsy heifer, with an expression of self-restraint and self-satisfaction which is not very attractive.” The man grabbing pies off the tray looks too much like the bride to be the bridegroom. So does the one pouring beer into three-pint mugs. They are probably her brothers. Her father, nowhere to be seen, must be dead. The bride’s mother, her face hidden, sits on her right. But the bridegroom’s face could not be hidden: Bruegel wouldn’t play a trick like that, argues Major Highet.

The bearded, be-daggered gentleman at the right, listening to the priest (who must have performed the ceremony) is too aloof to be newly married; he must be the local squire.

The elderly couple sitting between the priest and the bride do not look like her, so are probably her new in-laws. The desiccated character opposite them, yelling for more beer, has “the same peevish expression—vanity without dignity, sourness without purity.” But, like his father, he also has store clothes and an avaricious look. That’s the man, says Highet. He is “rich but ill-mannered. That is why the bride is sitting quietly with downcast eyes. Her smirk means, ‘I’m glad I’m getting married. I don’t much like my husband, but he is rich.’ ”

Concludes Major Highet: “It is rich enough to make … a complete sociological novel. . . . Will she suffer, or will she be contented . . . because she has bettered herself, and because her children will wear good black clothes and have carved chairs instead of wearing peasant stuff and sitting on the floor?”