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1023 - Marten van Cleve
Starting price
€90,000The reserve price is the minimum price accepted by the seller. Bidders cannot see this price. To win an item, you must place the highest bid and meet or exceed the reserve price.
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Estimation
€120,000 - 130,000Sale fees
Marten van Cleve An Outdoor Peasant Wedding Oil on panel (parquetted). 69.5 x 106 cm. Certificate Dr Joost Vander Auwera, Brussels, 26.1.2026. Provenance Private collection, Belgium. Marten van Cleve the Elder's peasant wedding is a lively affair: guests dance with abandon, drink cheerfully, and (at the margins) flirt heavily. Laden with gifts and a basket, a farmer and his wife bring gifts for the bride, who is occupied with the food before the red bridal canopy. Meanwhile, a bagpiper strikes up the dance, and the wedding party makes merry outdoors in front of a farmstead. The theme of the peasant wedding dance was among the most popular subjects in 16th-century Flemish painting. The present composition draws on pictorial ideas of Pieter Brueghel the Elder (c. 1525–1569), the popularization of which owed much to his Antwerp contemporary van Cleve and his workshop's prolific output. Several versions of the painting exist, most of them in museum collections. The present work, with its remarkably detailed rendering of the faces, their characterization, and the closely observed natural details, ranks among the finest of these versions. In examining the painting, Joost Vander Auwera identified traces in the underdrawing of a 'precise hand, unhesitating in its contours,' along with pentimenti, which, together with the spontaneity and vivid immediacy of the small background scenes, strongly support the attribution to the master's own hand.
Auction details
Old Masters and the 19th CenturyAuction house
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