Black Squirrel, Pieter Bruegel, Claude Monet

Bruegel, Monet, and Us once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and woman, as actualas 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 TrevelyanThe genesis of this story grew out from my long-term attraction to and considerationof two paintings: Pieter Brueghel s sixteenth century Fall of Icarus, and Claude Monet snineteenth century Impression, sunrise. For a long while I thought of the two as separateand 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 disparatesynchronicities, it got so that each time I looked at one, the other inevitably crept intothe back of my mind. I seem to have begun to believe the two works were linked, pairedalmost, possessing some sort of weird artistic consanguinity. Like a pair of long-losttwins who share commonality but are yet strangers to each other, a yin and a yang butwhere 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 Monetas a strange twosome, I attempted to write about their relationship. I eventually foundmyself creating a story with the paintings as a backdrop, a fi ction set in a beguilinglyattractive Midwest college town like the one where I now live and where, beneath ourpleasant veneer exist, demonstrable cases of those who bully others, who turn theirbacks to the beliefs and misfortunes of others. As I worked through my story, it began to dawn on me that while the Brueghel andthe Monet paintings are indeed diff erent from each other, they can be said to exist as aconjoined, contrasting duality, and I began to worry that my seeing Monet s depictionof monumental change, his declaration of Western culture throwing off the past andentering into a glowing new world of social brotherhood might well lean toward thePollyanna. That even as Monet celebrated human progress and awakening, the Brueghellurks in our psyche, that we need to remind ourselves that the past-like selfi shness ofturning away from misfortune remains with us; that the awakening in Western culturethe great Impressionist movement identifi ed has yet to fully penetrate. -Wooster, OhioOctober, 2025