Before it became International Workers’ Day, before it became a bank holiday, May 1st was a festival of spring: dancing, drinking, flirtation, communal release. It was a ritual of renewal with pagan roots and Christian overlays, not wholly approved by the authorities, where villages gathered around a tall pole dressed in ribbons and greenery — the axis of a world briefly, joyfully turned upside down.

That spirit is evident in “Dance Around the Maypole” by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, which hangs in the European galleries of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. It’s a small painting—oil on panel, just 20 by 30 inches—donated to the museum in 1992 by Salt Lake City businessman Val Browning. The UMFA director at the time called it the crown jewel of Browning’s extraordinary gift.

Pieter Brueghel the Younger was born in Brussels in 1564, the eldest son of the leading painter in northern Europe. While the Italians of the Renaissance focused on scripture and mythology, Northern European painters — and the Brueghel family especially—went out into the village square, up to a high vantage point, and across a teeming scene of ordinary life—and sometimes not so ordinary, if you’re thinking of the works of Hieronymus Bosch. Ordinary or not, these painting were teeming with life and everyday people—peasants eating, drinking, dancing, fighting, making love badly in public. It produced a completely different idea of what a painting could be.

Brueghel the Elder, the master practitioner of this sort of painting, died when the boy was five. His original paintings already dispersed across private collections throughout Europe. The younger Pieter grew up trained by his grandmother, absorbing his father’s vision through drawings, cartoons, and prints. By his mid-twenties he had his own studio in Antwerp, a dozen apprentices, and a thriving business supplying an export market hungry for Bruegelian peasant scenes. He’s been called a copyist ever since, but “Dance Around the Maypole” is an original composition, one that both Rubens and Van Dyck admired.

Beginning around 1616, Brueghel the Younger developed the kermis—the Flemish village festival—as his signature theme. This composition spreads across the panel but centers on the villagers whirling in a ring around a tall pole. Tradition—at least of the past couple of centuries—likes to read the pole as a phallic symbol. Contemporary folklorists are more likely to see it as a reference to the axis mundi, a vertical connection between earth and sky around which the community oriented itself. What is clear is that by Brueghel’s time it was a contested object. In 1644, England’s Long Parliament would ban maypoles outright as “a Heathenish vanity, generally abused to superstition and wickedness”—and villages kept erecting them anyway, turning the dance into a small annual act of defiance.

Defiant or not, Brueghel’s scene is definitely a party. Musicians animate the square; drink flows freely.  Keep looking, and the scene gets stranger, funnier. A man sprawls drunkenly in a woman’s lap. Nearby, a child holds up a small white flag—a fool’s banner, a standard image in Flemish festival scenes, a mock surrender to appetite and disorder. Couples kiss in corners. Figures brawl, peel off to swim naked in a stream, relieve themselves with cheerful indifference to the crowd behind them. Somewhere in the background, a sword fight has broken out. These are people who, at least for a day, throw off the shackles of regulation.

For a long time, educated viewers read these scenes as comic satire—look at these rustic people, so excessive, so gloriously unrefined. Like “coastal elites” making fun of the Nascar crowd. There’s mockery here, certainly. But there’s also something more human. Brueghel isn’t painting types or cautionary tales. He’s painting people—ridiculous, sensual, communal, vulnerable, alive.  That feels like a useful thing to remember on May Day. We’re told we live in a time of loneliness and digital isolation. We could use a few more parties like this.

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.