A barn is full of wedding guests at long tables. At the center the bride sits in front of a green cloth hung on the wall, a paper crown above her head and her hands folded. Two men carry in bowls of porridge on a wooden door taken off its hinges, while a bagpiper stands at the left.

In the foreground a small child in a red cap sits eating among jugs and a basket of crockery, and a man at the left pours from a large jug. The groom cannot be picked out: by Flemish custom, the Kunsthistorisches Museum says, he was not present at the wedding feast. The museum points out a lawyer in a mortarboard, a Franciscan monk and, at the far right, the lord of the manor with his dog; none of the guests is named. Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted it in 1568, and the museum calls it a realistic record of a Flemish peasants' wedding rather than an allegory. Its recorded history begins in 1594, when Archduke Ernst acquired it in Brussels; it later belonged to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm.

Vienna houses twelve Bruegels, which the museum calls the world's largest and most important collection of his paintings. It is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.