The Lament for Icarus

• 1. Introduction

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  The Lament for Icarus arrived at London's Royal Academy exhibition in 1898 and was purchased the same year through the Chantrey Bequest, a public fund established by the sculptor Sir Francis Leggatt Chantrey to acquire modern art for the nation. Within two years, it had won a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris. What drew such recognition to this painting was not simply its mythological subject, but something stranger: Icarus still has his wings. They are fully intact, spread wide, modeled on the pattern of the bird-of-paradise. Nothing melted. Nothing fell away. Herbert James Draper looked at one of antiquity's most famous cautionary tales and chose to tell a different story. What that story is, and what it reveals about how the Victorians understood failure, beauty, and the body, is what this documentary explores.

• 2. Draper and His Subject

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  By the 1890s, Herbert James Draper had anchored his practice firmly in ancient Greek mythology. That decade, the subject of Icarus had already been treated by Frederic Leighton, who painted the myth in 1869. Leighton's version focused on the moment before disaster: the preparations for flight. Draper moved to the other end of the story entirely, to the aftermath. He painted the tragic ending, not the hopeful beginning. For the arrangement of figures in the composition, Draper borrowed from Leighton's own method of depicting separate, distinct figures within a single canvas. To populate that arrangement, he employed four professional models: Ethel Gurden, Ethel Warwick, Florence Bird, and Luigi di Luca. Each brought a named, individual presence to what might otherwise have been generic mourning figures.

• 3. The Body and Its Meaning

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  Late-Victorian painting and sculpture shared a particular preoccupation: using the male body as a surface onto which subjective emotion could be projected. The Lament for Icarus is a concentrated example of that tendency. Icarus lies cradled in the arms of a nymph, his body described in the critical literature as appearing to melt within her hold. Draper used liquid light effects throughout the canvas while holding on to the underlying solidity of form. His palette runs toward warm colours. The tanned skin of Icarus carries a specific narrative charge: it refers directly to his nearness to the sun before the fall. The setting sun casts its rays across distant cliffs in the background, and that detail works as a visual clock, marking the brief and irreversible nature of Icarus's flight. The art critic Justine Hopkins observed that Draper identifies Icarus with the heroes of the Pre-Raphaelites and symbolists, figures who, in Hopkins's phrasing, "manage to live fast, die young and leave a beautiful corpse."

• 4. Intact Wings, Broken Myth

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  Hopkins's phrase about a beautiful corpse is itself drawn from a specific source: a line in Willard Motley's 1947 novel Knock on Any Door and its film adaptation. That the phrase passed from mid-century American fiction into Victorian art criticism says something about how persistently the idea of glamorous early death recurs across cultures. Draper's most deliberate departure from the original myth sits in plain sight throughout the canvas. In the classical telling, Icarus fell because the wax holding his wings dissolved in the heat of the sun, and he plunged into the sea with bare arms flapping. In Draper's version, the wings are whole. The feathers survive. The bird-of-paradise patterning is undamaged. Scholars read this as a considered choice: the image of a winged creature, intact, creates a more symbolic, romantic, and elegant appearance than a body stripped of its technology. Moralizing and sensual at once, the painting became what one critical tradition called an image of epic failure, one that makes failure look like something close to transcendence.