Silver Wedding

This signed and dated painting depicts the celebration of a wealthy couple’s silver wedding anniversary during the seventeenth century. The painter fills the scene with richly painted details, harkening back to the Dutch seventeenth-century genre painters, chief among them Gabriël Metsu. The revival of this style in the nineteenth century was led by Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, whose paintings were enormously popular among the newly wealthy European and American bourgeois of his day.