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It is thus proper to remark that this class easily glides into the deeply sad, the horrible, terrifying, nightmare-producing, "satanic literature;" Goya's paintings of robbers and thieves being garroted; Wiertz, a genius bizarre to the point of extravagance, who paints only suicides or the heads of guillotined criminals.
Born out of his due time, a dreamer of dreams, Wiertz is a sad example of the futility of looking backward in art. On the way up from Brussels to Bruges it is well to alight at Ghent for a few hours. There are attractions enough to keep one for several days, but as our objective was St. And an adventurous time it was. The Ostend express landed its passengers at the St.
There was a horrible realism about them which reminded him irresistibly of the awful collection of pictorial horrors in the Musée Wiertz, in Brussels those works of the brilliant but unhappy genius who was driven into insanity by the sheer exuberance of his own morbid imagination.
Nor is it as with Rossetti, a mystic opiate, or with Wiertz, a madman's delirious fancy. Moreau was a philosophic poet, and though he disclaimed being a "literary" painter, it is literature that is the mainspring of his elevated and decorative art.
I do not know or care how many or how few of the Belgians like or dislike the pictures of Wiertz. They could not be either justified or condemned by a mere majority of Belgians. But I am very certain that the defiance to Prussia did not come from a majority of Belgians.
Nevertheless humanity stood before him no longer in the pensive sweetness of Italian art, but in the staring and ghastly attitudes of a Wiertz Museum, and with the leer of a study by Van Beers. His conduct during these first weeks had been desultory beyond description.
In a picture gallery at Brussels there is a painting by Wiertz, most cynical of artists, representing the man of the Future and the things of the Past. A naturalist holds in his right hand a magnifying glass, and in the other a handful of Napoleon and his marshals, guns, and battle-flags, tiny objects swelling with meaningless glory.
It was the picture of a man's head that had been severed from the body; and was repulsive enough to have been painted by Wiertz himself. The picture almost terrified me, but I thought, if no worse harm befall me what odds? and I sat down all wondering and dazed, and drew a cigar from the box upon the table.
When supplies have given out several Arctic explorers have had to resort to eating the bodies of their comrades. In the famous Wiertz Museum in Brussels is a painting by this eccentric artist in which he has graphically portrayed a woman driven to insanity by hunger, who has actually destroyed her child with a view to cannibalism.
The night remained perfect and the moon possessed a tropical brilliance, casting deep and sharply defined shadows, and lending to the whole visible landscape a quality of hardness which for some obscure reason set me thinking of a painting by Wiertz. The low-pitched voices continued in what I thought was a dispute.
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