The Black Squirrel, Pieter Bruegel, Claude Monet
Portrait of and Lament for a Midwest College Town
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Bruegel, Monet, and Us "...once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and woman, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now are gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shorty by gone...." -George Trevelyan The genesis of this story grew out from my long-term attraction to and consideration of two paintings: Pieter Brueghel's sixteenth century Fall of Icarus, and Claude Monet's nineteenth century Impression, sunrise. For a long while I thought of the two as separate a...
Bruegel, Monet, and Us "...once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and woman, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now are gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shorty by gone...." -George Trevelyan The genesis of this story grew out from my long-term attraction to and consideration of two paintings: Pieter Brueghel's sixteenth century Fall of Icarus, and Claude Monet's nineteenth century Impression, sunrise. For a long while I thought of the two as separate and nearly unrelated works of art - diff erent paintings, diff erent eras, diff erent traditions, diff erent references and messages. Yet in spite of my being fully aware of their disparate synchronicities, it got so that each time I looked at one, the other inevitably crept into the back of my mind. I seem to have begun to believe the two works were linked, paired almost, possessing some sort of weird artistic consanguinity. Like a pair of long-lost twins who share commonality but are yet strangers to each other, a yin and a yang but where I didn't know which was the yang and which was the yin. In this frustrating attempt to clear up of why I considered the Brueghel and the Monet as a strange twosome, I attempted to write about their relationship. I eventually found myself creating a story with the paintings as a backdrop, a fi ction set in a beguilingly attractive Midwest college town like the one where I now live and where, beneath our pleasant veneer exist, demonstrable cases of those who bully others, who turn their backs to the beliefs and misfortunes of others. As I worked through my story, it began to dawn on me that while the Brueghel and the Monet paintings are indeed diff erent from each other, they can be said to exist as a conjoined, contrasting duality, and I began to worry that my seeing Monet's depiction of monumental change, his declaration of Western culture throwing off the past and entering into a glowing new world of social brotherhood might well lean toward the Pollyanna. That even as Monet celebrated human progress and awakening, the Brueghel lurks in our psyche, that we need to remind ourselves that the past-like selfi shness of turning away from misfortune remains with us; that the awakening in Western culture the great Impressionist movement identifi ed has yet to fully penetrate. -Wooster, Ohio October, 2025
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