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View at the museum ↗Allegory of Marital Strife
Pieter Serwouters1607
- Attribution
- Pieter Serwouters (Flemish, 1586-1657) after David Vinckboons I (Flemish, 1576-1632)
- Medium
- Etching on cream laid paper
- Physical dimensions
- Image: 17.1 × 22 cm (6 3/4 × 8 11/16 in.); Sheet: 17.2 × 22 cm (6 13/16 × 8 11/16 in.)
- Credit line
- The Wallace L. DeWolf and Joseph Brooks Fair Collections
Museum metadata is available under CC0. Image availability and rights are separate; consult the source record.
Source rights statement: Public domain
View the museum record ↗From the museum
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.
Description: Art Institute of Chicago · CC BY 4.0