Art Institute of Chicago

Allegory of Marital Strife

Pieter Serwouters (Flemish, 1586-1657)

Date

1607

Medium

Etching on cream laid paper

Culture

Flanders

Department

Prints and Drawings

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

Pieter Serwouters frequently produced etchings after drawings by the painter David Vinckboons on humorous genre subjects. The peasant couple in this playful etching is fighting over the age-old question of who wears the pants in a marriage. The poem below the image implies that the husband’s station will be permanently compromised once he obeys his heckling wife and helps her don a pair of his trousers. Here he kneels, nearly cowering at her vigorous gestures, the outcome of the scene seemingly already in her favor. Their disorderly audience—an eavesdropping servant woman, amorous mongrel, and lazy, sated pig—hints at the comic gravity of this role reversal.

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