The Village Fair

Depictions of merrymaking were as much a part of the 17th-century Dutch pride-of-place and material prosperity as the marvelously descriptive paintings of Dutch still life, architecture and domestic interiors. These village celebrants have gathered for a festival in which music-making, dance and considerable consumption of tavern ale are the main attractions. In the left foreground, with a flag in his hat, a blind, itinerant hurdy-gurdy player has left his instrument on a bench to accommodate a couple coaxing him to dance. The lively scene occurs beneath a sky described by finely etched horizontal and diagonal lines with areas of white corresponding to unworked areas of the plate.