My Bruegel Quest, I

My favorite painter is Bruegel. That’s Pieter Bruegel the Elder (circa 1525-’30–1569), as opposed to his sons Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder. (I don’t know where the boys got the “h.”) This has been the case for a long time. I believe my attachment to the artist dates from high school, when I read W.H. Auden’s great poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” (1940), which begins:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood…

Auden goes to present as his main object lesson what he mispellingly calls “Breughel’s Icarus,” a painting formally known as Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.

I stood in front of it last week.

This was no matter of happenstance. I recently took on the bucket-list project of going to see every extant Bruegel painting. This is more doable, than, say, Rembrandt, as there are only forty-nine of them, including three in private collections, which allowed me to immediately reduce the count to forty-six. Furthermore, two are in New York, less than 100 miles away from me, and whopping thirteen of the forty-four remaining works are in just one museum, the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna. (I made my way to the Kunsthistorisches many…