Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Bruegel

Description

About the painting. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus shows a ploughman, a shepherd and a ship going about their business on a bright coast while Icarus, who has just fallen from the sky, drowns unnoticed in the bottom corner. The composition is Bruegel's; the Brussels canvas is now thought to be an early copy of his lost original. Composition c. 1558, this canvas c. 1560 to 1600. Oil on canvas, 73.5 x 112 cm. Original in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels.

Hung above a desk or reading chair, this composition settles a room rather than dominating it: a wide horizon, a ploughman bent to his furrow, ships moving unhurried toward the edge of the world, and only on close look the small pale legs of a boy vanishing into the sea. It rewards the kind of looking a study or library invites, where a picture can be returned to rather than merely glanced at.

About Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

The painting attributed to the workshop of Pieter Brueghel the Elder takes its subject from the Ovid myth of Icarus, but subordinates the mythic event almost entirely to the ordinary business of the world going on around it. The ploughman, the shepherd, the fisherman on the rocks, none look up. Daylight falls evenly across cultivated fields and open water, built from close greens and blues that keep the eye moving along the coastline before it finds, almost by accident, the splash and scattered feathers marking the fall itself.

This deliberate smallness is the argument of the work: catastrophe happens at the margin of human attention, and the painting is constructed, in its distribution of weight and colour, to prove that point rather than state it. Coming from the circle of Brueghel in the sixteenth century, it belongs to a Netherlandish tradition that treated landscape as a subject worthy of the same care once reserved for religious or mythological scenes, folding narrative into topography until the two become inseparable.

The hand-painted reproduction

ByMuseum recreates this famous painting as a hand-painted oil painting reproduction, worked by a trained painter directly onto canvas rather than printed. The palette is matched passage by passage, the brushwork left visible where the original demands it, so the furrowed fields and the water carry the same layered depth and surface texture as oil paint applied by hand. The result is a painted object with its own tactile presence, suited to a collector who wants the ploughman and the sinking legs of Icarus to hold a wall the way the myth holds its quiet warning.

• Hand-painted reproduction in oil on artist-grade canvas
• Available in multiple sizes to suit the wall
• Gallery-ready presentation, ready to hang
• Certificate of authenticity included
• Painted to order in 2 to 3 weeks, then delivered in 5 to 7 days