There’s one fail-safe way to be alone with a great painting for a while. Get to the museum maybe half an hour before opening time to be at the head of the queue, then stride purposefully towards the gallery where you know the painting is to be found. (Provided you don’t actually break into a run, nobody’s going to slap the handcuffs on you).  With a bit of luck you’ll have a quarter of an hour, maybe more, by yourself to examine the work as if it were hanging on your own wall.

Using this strategy I’ve been able to gaze in silence at everything from Las Meninas, in the Prado, to the View of Delft at the Mauritshuis (a painting which, in Proust’s great work, caused the death of the elderly writer Bergotte, when - curious to see again the tiniest of details, a little patch of yellow wall - he unwisely roused himself to attend the Vermeer exhibition in Paris).

I have never gone so far as to put my life in danger for a painting. But this last Friday, as a surprise treat for Jane, we took the Eurostar to Brussels, mainly to see one painting in the Musée des Beaux Arts, by Pieter Brueghel the Elder.

Not that Brussels contains the greatest collection of Brueghels: for that, as I mentioned in an earlier posting, you should go to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

Nor did we go to the Musée des Beaux Arts to see their other superb work by the elder Brueghel, the Census at Bethlehem, where Joseph leads Mary, mounted on her donkey, through a frozen Flemish village to pay their taxes to the foreign emperor.

No, the painting we had made our pilgrimage to see was The Fall of Icarus, which affected W.H.Auden so much on a visit to Brussels in 1938 that he made it the subject of his wonderful poem, Musée des Beaux Arts.

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well, they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

(Click on start to hear the poet reading his own work, his RP accent barely affected by his long stay in the USA, except for the <a> in  masters.  If you can’t hear the poem, you will have to download the QuickTime plugin).

We had the best part of half an hour to look, in great detail, at the painting, no other visitors, no museum staff disturbing us

Your attention is drawn first to the rather elegant-looking ploughman, his eyes downcast in concentration as he carves out the neatest of furrows in the tiniest of fields; then to the ‘expensive delicate ship’ where, when you look more closely, you see a few sailors presumably unfurling the sails, as intent on their work as the ploughman.

The shepherd seems to be equally intent, not keeping an eye on his sheep, some of which, to his left, are straying rather dangerously towards the water.  What he is staring at we do not know.  He is gazing upwards, towards or beyond the trees, his head tilted diametrically away from the flailing legs of the unfortunate Icarus. 

The remaining human figure, at the water’s edge in the bottom right hand corner, could, one thinks at first, be looking at the drowning man.  But we privileged viewers, our eyes no more than a foot or so away from the canvas, could see that he was slumped over, the result - no doubt - of whatever had been in the goblet just to his left.

To see this sort of detail you would need to get a reproduction of the work to fill your computer screen. Or, even better, to take the Eurostar to Brussels and, on any morning except Mondays, arrive at the Musée des Beaux Arts by, say, twenty to ten.