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Lot Essay
This lively and colorful scene depicts Flemish villagers celebrating Whitsuntide. During this festival, which commemorates the Pentecost but may have its origins in pagan rituals, a child from the village is named the 'Whitsun Bride'. After her peers adorn her with flowers and ribbons, she heads a parade of children through the village, collecting money to be given to an orphanage or other charity. In this scene, the Whitsun Bride is recognizable by the crown on her head, long blond hair, and pink apron. As adults look on, boisterous children join the procession: ahead of the parade two small boys play a fiddle and drum while several of the girls have lifted their skirts over their heads, exposing their mended petticoats; meanwhile, at right, another child exposes her bare bottom.
While Brueghel typically painted the same subject multiple times, relatively few versions of The Whitsun Bride exist. Klaus Ertz (Ertz, op. cit., II, p. 764), who lists only two autograph works of this subject in his catalogue raisonné on the artist, suggests that the present picture is a second version of the painting now in Staatliche Kunstsammlungen und Museen in Dessau (inv. no. 45). Close to a scene of the same subject by David Vinckboons in a private collection (Ertz, op. cit., II, p. 758, fig. 604), the present painting also includes elements found in the work of Pieter Breugel I. The motif of the girls with upturned skirts, for instance, is in Children's Games of 1560, now in the Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna. Like that seminal work, The Whitsun Bride presents a joyful yet somewhat unruly vision of childhood.
In the nineteenth century, this painting belonged to Grazioso Enea Lanfranconi (1850-1895), a collector of Lombard origins who amassed an important collection of Old Master paintings in Bratislava (Ciulisová, op. cit., pp. 56-58). After his collection was auctioned in Cologne at his death, the painting came to the United States, and was donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1939 by the Estate of George Quackenbush.
While Brueghel typically painted the same subject multiple times, relatively few versions of The Whitsun Bride exist. Klaus Ertz (Ertz, op. cit., II, p. 764), who lists only two autograph works of this subject in his catalogue raisonné on the artist, suggests that the present picture is a second version of the painting now in Staatliche Kunstsammlungen und Museen in Dessau (inv. no. 45). Close to a scene of the same subject by David Vinckboons in a private collection (Ertz, op. cit., II, p. 758, fig. 604), the present painting also includes elements found in the work of Pieter Breugel I. The motif of the girls with upturned skirts, for instance, is in Children's Games of 1560, now in the Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna. Like that seminal work, The Whitsun Bride presents a joyful yet somewhat unruly vision of childhood.
In the nineteenth century, this painting belonged to Grazioso Enea Lanfranconi (1850-1895), a collector of Lombard origins who amassed an important collection of Old Master paintings in Bratislava (Ciulisová, op. cit., pp. 56-58). After his collection was auctioned in Cologne at his death, the painting came to the United States, and was donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1939 by the Estate of George Quackenbush.