Parties and Celebrations

About

Feasts, weddings and festivals give artists crowds, costume and a chance to show a society at ease or at its most excessive. Paolo Veronese's The Wedding at Cana (1563) fills an enormous canvas with Venetian guests, musicians and servants around a biblical miracle. Pieter Bruegel the Elder turned to village life in The Peasant Wedding (c. 1567), where the bride sits beneath a paper crown while helpers carry bowls on an unhinged door. Dirck Hals and other Haarlem painters produced merry companies drinking, singing and flirting, and Antoine Watteau's fêtes galantes of the 1710s turned aristocratic picnics into shimmering reverie.

Modern artists followed the party into cities and clubs. Archibald Motley's Nightlife (1943) catches a crowded Chicago bar in full swing, and Jessica Craig-Martin photographs society galas in tight close-ups of hands, jewellery and raised glasses. Look for music-makers, spilled drink and the one guest who is not joining in.