Icarus (Icare essayant ses Ailes)

Philippe Grass was a French sculptor, born in Wolxheim (in Alsace) in 1801. He was a pupil of the better-known Baron François Joseph Bosio. This bronze statuette representing Icarus was made in France in about 1841 as a reduced version of his work.

Icarus has been depicted over the years by sculptors and painters alike. In Greek mythology, he and his father Daedalus planned to escape from Crete where they had been imprisoned by King Minos. Daedalus made them both wings, of feathers and wax, to attempt the flight. He told his son not to fly too near the sun, but Icarus did so, the wax melted, and he plunged down into the sea.

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This statuette was purchased from the French Industrial Exposition held in Paris in 1844 and is one of the earliest acquisitions of the Museum when it was still at Somerset House. A full scale statue in plaster was shown at the Salon of 1831. A statue in bronze was exhibited at the Salon of 1841 and again at the Exposition Universelle at Paris in 1855. Here it was acquired by the Strasbourg Museum, where it was destroyed in the Siege of 1870. This V&A bronze reduction, cast by Eck and Durand, is apparently unpublished. There is another version in the Minneapolis Institute of Art (accession no. 74.8) and these two bronzes may be the only surviving visual records of a once celebrated statue.