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The bronze sculpture in the garden of Kunstmuseum Den Haag leaves no room for misunderstanding: the fall of Icarus hits hard. He literally falls to the ground and makes a remarkable shoulder landing so that his skinny, elongated and slightly bowed legs stick up in the air. The death knell of the tragic figure from Greek mythology has been depicted by hundreds of artists, but seldom has the unprecedented expressiveness and dynamism that Piet Esser embodies in his bronze Icarus been equalled or surpassed.

Esser is one of the most important portrait sculptors of the twentieth century. He learned his trade from Jan Bronner at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. In countless obituaries that appeared after his death, Esser's importance to Dutch medal art is emphasised. Rightly so, but this does not do justice to the influence that he, as a charismatic professor, had on new generations of sculptors.

Esser was one of the first leading sculptors who introduced figurative abstraction, a style halfway between total abstraction and recognisable figuration, and gave it a permanent place in his free work and monumental commissions. He won the Prix de Rome in 1938 and succeeded his teacher Bronner at the Rijksakademie in 1947. Esser became known, among other things, for his Troelstramonument (The Hague), the Brederomonument (Amsterdam), the Watersnoodrampmonument (Rotterdam) and the portraits of Charlotte van Pallandt (Van Pallandt heirs collection).

Icarus' underlines the sculptor's ability to transform a dramatic story into sculpture that is almost reminiscent of film in terms of movement. The fountain group 'Hercules and Antaeus', which Esser made twenty years earlier (in 1954) for the provincial government building in Arnhem, is an early predecessor of the bronze sculpture 'Icarus'. Here too, the virtuoso composition of two intertwined figures is dominated by the abstracted gesture of two raised legs.