Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

This painting shows the fall of Icarus, the boy from Greek myth who flew too close to the sun on wings made of feathers and wax. The wax melted. Icarus fell into the sea and drowned. But you have to look hard to find him. He is a tiny pair of legs disappearing into the water at the lower right, his white feathers scattered on the surface. The rest of the painting goes on without him. A plowman drives his horse across a field in the foreground, his back to the sea, absorbed in his work. A shepherd looks up at the sky, his sheep grazing on a hillside. A fisherman sits at the edge of the water. Ships sail past on a calm sea. The sun is setting behind a mountain, casting a warm light across the land. The world is beautiful and indifferent. Icarus drowns and nobody notices. The painting is attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the great Netherlandish painter of peasant life and landscape, but the attribution is disputed. The composition is certainly Bruegel's, but the handling of the paint is weaker than in his authenticated works, and many scholars believe it is a copy of a lost original, painted in Bruegel's workshop or by a follower shortly after his death. The original may have been painted in the 1550s, when Bruegel was producing his major landscapes. The surviving version is in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels. The painting inspired one of the best-known poems of the 20th century, W. H. Auden's 'Musee des Beaux Arts', written in 1938 after Auden saw the painting in Brussels. Auden's poem describes how the old masters understood suffering, how it happens 'while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.' The plowman, Auden wrote, 'may have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, but for him it was not an important failure.' Oil on canvas, 74 by 112 centimeters, roughly 29 by 44 inches. The painting has suffered from condition problems: the colors have faded, the surface is abraded, and the blue of the sea has darkened with age. The plowman in the foreground is the best-preserved section, his red shirt and brown horse still clear. The sun is a pale disc behind the mountain, its original brilliance lost. The wide horizontal format and landscape subject make this print work well in a living room, study, or dining room. The painting's theme, the indifference of the world to individual suffering, gives it a weight that rewards repeated viewing. A dark wood frame suits the painting's earthy palette. The 18x24 size gives the landscape and the tiny figure of Icarus enough room to read. The painting is in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, where it has been since the museum acquired it in 1919. This is a public domain artwork. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.