Pieter Bruegel the Elder is often considered one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Renaissance. His work was primarily comprised of landscapes and scenes from peasant life. He also took a very keen interest in the progression of the seasons. His paintings are widely known for their attention to detail and their attempts to render events that fell outside the scope of more traditional representations. Within these details there are also often instances of the surreal or grotesque.
Bruegel's peasant scenes were commonly remarked upon for their relative lack of sentimentality and their focus on the various aspects of village life, including dances, weddings, harvests, hunts, feasts, and various games. They were also known for their illustration of various common proverbs as well as their depiction of figures (or small groups) who seem unengaged with the crowd around them. His renditions of these events took a fairly wide lens, painting figures equivalently small from a removed perspective. In Bruegel's lifetime, painting peasants was a relative anomaly. He became widely considered an innovator of the form and fundamentally shifted subsequent painters' approaches to their subject matter, in addition to style. Bruegel's paintings were neither mocking nor cloyingly optimistic; instead, they sought to capture the beautiful earthiness and disorder of these events.
(Landscape with the Fall of Icarus)
His approach to landscape was similarly groundbreaking for his use of the distortion of perspective. Keeping with the aesthetic conventions of the time, most artists before Bruegel painted landscapes in a panoramic view, with a heightened viewpoint. Bruegel however, as shown in the painting referenced by the poem, would choose to place focus on a seemingly minor character, placing them in the clear foreground of the piece. This has the dual effect of changing the subject of the work (it is more about the farmer than it is about Icarus) and altering the layout of the entire scene. In "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," the perspective sits close to the farmer in a way that makes him the central figure while allowing the viewer to peek over the edge of the cliff he is working on. This radical move similarly opened up many compositional possibilities and matched well with Bruegel's attempts to democratize the subject matter of his pieces. The question of perspective wasn't solely a stylistic one. It also showed that another sort of figure could be the center of the scene. The point of focus did not always need to be religious figures or the ruling class, in Bruegel's eyes.
Bruegel was, in so many ways, a perfect fit for William Carlos Williams to write about. Williams, like Bruegel, sought to use his work to elevate a different sort of story. His poetry was known for its use of plain language and a focus on directly conveying his imagery. In Bruegel, he found a very natural subject; someone who, like him, wanted to redefine who and what artists could focus upon.
