From the website of Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten (KMSKA), 11 April 2012
Nine months into Bruegel Land, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp and the Municipal Museums of Lier are presenting the first in a series of focus exhibitions. Fun and Fracas shows a selection of paintings that runs the gamut of leisure behaviour: from merrymaking and playing to drinking and brawling. The scenes depict people who are celebrating special moments – annual festivals or important life events – in a variety of ways: eating doughnuts at a fair, drinking and smoking in a dimly lit inn, or conversing politely in a bourgeois parlour. Weddings, parades and processions are often concluded in a tavern, where boozing and gambling not rarely end in a fight. Especially when someone is caught cheating…