Die Klage um Ikarus

Draper exhibited this in London in 1898, deep into the Victorian taste for grand classical myth painted at full size, and it made his name. Everyone knew the story. Icarus flew too near the sun on wings his father had built, the wax melted, and he fell. Draper does one thing that is his own. He gives Icarus enormous dark feathered wings, far bigger than a man, so the boy lies broken on the rocks still strapped into the machine that killed him, the feathers scorched at their tips. Three sea nymphs have gathered around the body against a low burning sky. Draper had trained partly in Paris and knew the newer French painting, but here he sides with the older British world of Burne-Jones, where a legend is worth a whole wall.