Aertsen, Pieter

Market Woman with Vegetable Stall

1567; Oil on wood, 11 x 110 cm; Stiftung preußischer Kulturbesitz, Staatliche Museen, Berlin

The painting demonstrates a wide range of agricultural products, made possible by the improvements in production methods. Offering her fruits and vegetables, the woman is almost an appendage to her produce. Despite all exaggeration, the picture quite adequately shows the new economic prosperity of the time. At the same time, however, it still contains a background scene in genre style of embracing lovers in a stable, thus relating the painting to late medieval peasant satires. Peasants were regarded as lustful, sensuous and carnal by the middle classes.