Michael Glover reviews Sickert: Love, Death & Ennui >
LONDON — As W.H. Auden reminds us, at the end of his great 1938 poem “Musée des Beaux Arts,” of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” (c. 1560), the fact that something momentous has just happened — a famous creature from Greek mythology called Icarus has burnt his wings by flying too close to the sun, and plunged to his death in the ocean — means nothing to the plowman on the hill, who walks idly by.
And we, the onlookers at this painting, may feel the same way, because the action — this disappearance of a small, kicking leg or two — happens a bit too near the bottom edge to bother us overmuch. It’s all so small and unremarkable in comparison with the puff-bellied sails of the ship nearby or the plowman’s brilliant red shirt (what a shirt that is!).
And this is exactly how I found myself feeling as I walked around a handsome gallery in a very fashionable district of north London, where the elegant stucco terraces were gleaming white in the light of the September sun.
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