print
- Museum number
- 2018,7040.1
- Description
-
The Village Fair; in the centre a group eating and drinking at a table outside an inn; at left stalls and a procession to a church; at right, dancing, fighting, a chase on horseback and a Maibaum; much reduced copy after Sebald Beham (Pauli 1245).
Engraving
- Production date
- 1620-1640 (c.)
- Dimensions
-
Height: 154 millimetres (sheet)
-
Width: 403 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- For Sebald Beham's original woodcut, see 1895,0122.303; Johann Theodor de Bry's late sixteenth-century engraving reproduces Beham's woodcut in reverse and likewise much reduced, see 1883,1110.489 and E,7.321.+. Alison Stewart discusses copies after Beham's print (in particular, sixteenth-century woodcut copies in Erlangen, Oxford, and Gotha, all similiar in size to Beham's original woodcut); this print is not known to her. See 'Before Bruegel: Sebald Beham and the Origins of Peasant Festival Imagery' (Ashgate, 2008) pp. 59-157.
This print is an important example of how French publishers at the beginning of the seventeenth century were looking to earlier, foreign compositions to recycle. Beham's popular composition is retitled ‘Vie rustique’ and equipped with French verses describing the delights of country life. Interestingly, the central figure seated at the table has lost the resemblance to Martin Luther, identified by Stewart in Beham's woodcut.
- Location
- Not on display
- Acquisition date
- 2018
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 2018,7040.1
