Peasants dance to bagpipes beside a gallows where a magpie perches, while a vast river valley opens behind them into blue distance. Painted the year after the Duke of Alba arrived to crush dissent in the Netherlands, it plays on proverbs about gossip and about dancing on the gallows. It is among the last pictures Bruegel painted before his death in 1569.
Look closer
The gallows is an impossible object: its posts stand side by side, yet the crossbeam recedes into space. In the shadows at far left, a man relieves himself.
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