The Parable of the Blind

Description

Ochre, dull red, and a muted slate blue move across the composition in a chain of stumbling figures, each colour handed from one body to the next like a warning passed along a line. The earth tones dominate: browns and greys that root the six blind men to the path, broken only by a patch of pale sky and the cool green of the village pond toward which they lurch. Brueghel lets the colour do the narrative work, binding the men together visually even as the story pulls them apart.

About Parable of the Blind

The painting, made in the final years of the career of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, takes its subject from the biblical parable of the blind leading the blind, and stages it with a plainness that has nothing to do with indifference. The six men progress in a diagonal line across the panel, the first already fallen into the ditch, the second toppling after him, the rest still upright but doomed by the chain of hands and staffs that connects them. Brueghel renders each face with a clinical attention to the physical fact of blindness, the ruined eye sockets and tilted heads, without tipping into caricature.

Behind the figures a Flemish village recedes in soft grey greens, its church and cottages indifferent to the unfolding collapse. The horizon sits low, giving the sky more weight than the incident below deserves, which only sharpens the sense that this small human failure is being witnessed by nothing and no one. Brueghel had, by this point, moved decisively away from the crowded panoramas of his earlier work toward compositions built around a single sustained action, and the painting stands among the clearest statements of that late style.

The hand-painted reproduction

Bringing this composition back into oil asks a painter to work through the same sequence of decisions Brueghel made, laying in the ground tones before building the ochres and reds of the coats in successive passes. ByMuseum artists produce each oil on canvas reproduction by hand, matching the palette stroke by stroke and preserving the ridges of paint where a coat or a staff catches the light. This is not a mechanically printed image but an oil painting reproduction built up in layers on artist-grade canvas, so the surface holds the same variation in thickness and edge that the original demands of anyone who looks closely.

• Hand-painted in oil on artist-grade cotton canvas
• Available in multiple sizes to suit your wall
• Arrives gallery-ready for immediate display
• Includes a certificate of authenticity
• Free worldwide shipping, with no shipping charge to any country