Getty Museum
Peasant Kermis
Creator
David VinckboonsFlemish Artist · 1576–1632
All works by this person →Popular and prolific, David Vinckboons trained with his painter father, who brought the family to Holland to escape religious persecution in Flanders. Despite having ten children, Vinckboons's life appears relatively uneventful. He stayed in Amsterdam, where his family had settled years before, and he must have died before January 1633, when his widow appeared before Amsterdam's orphan committee.
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- 1604
- Medium
- Pen and brown ink and brush and brown and gray wash
- Culture
- Flemish
- Department
- Drawings
- Institution
- Getty Museum
David Vinckboons filled this carefully constructed scene of a peasant festival or *kermis* with many subtle details. In the front, a couple and two children cross a footbridge to join the celebration, meeting another group as they depart. A line of wildly dancing laborers that snakes through the center of the drawing then leads the viewer's eye farther back. Small clusters of revelers fill the rest of the scene. Many toast the dancers, consuming their wine or beer straight from the barrel or from jugs. Vinckboons drew the landscape, figures, and buildings with a fine pen and brown ink while using darker areas of gray wash to add volume and depth to the buildings and water in the foreground. But the villagers interested Vinckboons more than the landscape. Their scurrying forms are the focus, while the dilapidated buildings and trees simply form a backdrop to their activities.
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