MOREAU, Adrien
(b. 1843, Troyes, d. 1906, Paris)

Silver Wedding

1879
Oil on canvas, 94 x 133 cm
Private collection

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.