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The attackers presently lighted a large fire at the edge of the clearing, that they might have light to fight by; and what with the ruddy flickering of the flames and the incessant flashing of the rifles, the running crouching forms of the troops, and the desperate energy with which the defenders fought, the scene was a fit subject for the brush of a Wiertz or a Verestchagin.

Something in the voice of the woman, although I could only hear her occasionally, piqued yet eluded my memory. But it was the voice of a young woman, whilst that of the man suggested a foreigner of some sort and one past youth. Subconsciously pursuing the Wiertz idea, I know not why, I invested the dimly-visible speakers with distinct personalities.

I thought how I had looked out of my window and had found in the moon-bathed landscape something which had translated my ideas to that strange picture of Wiertz.

All the work by the blacksmith artist Quinten Matsys in color or iron proved of great interest to the young Americans. Finally Leo, who knew much of the old masters of Europe, took Alfonso to see the Musee Wiertz, which contains all the works of a highly gifted and eccentric master.

The Musée Wiertz is worth visiting only as a chamber of horrors. When Wiertz is not morbid and repulsive he is of the vasty inane, a man of genius gone daft, obsessed by the mighty shades of Rubens and Michael Angelo. Wiertz was born in 1806 and died in 1865.

His tones recall the pâte of Rubens without its warmth and splendour. When Wiertz was content to keep within bounds his portraits and feminine nudes are not without beauty. Startling, too, are the tricks played on your nerves by the peepholes.

TheCow in a Stable,” by Mauve, contains by his management of this rude and simple subject all the possibilities opened to and demanded by compositions involving many elements. It might stand as the light and dark scheme for some of the allegories of Rubens, Wiertz or Correggio, or for many genre interiors, or for anarrangementof flowers.

In a kind of distemper Wiertz painted Napoleon in the Infernal Region, Vision of a Beheaded Man, A Suicide, The Last Cannon, Curiosity, and Contest of Good and Evil, Hunger, Madness and Crime, etc. As Brussels is located near the center of Belgium, the city is very convenient to several cities that contain many works attractive to painters and architects.

"Is she well-known?" James recognised familiar symptoms and his hopes leapt high. "If I show you the canvas and you recognise the model will you promise not to tell anybody? I am painting it by a new process. I got the idea from Wiertz. The violet gauze of the veil is only indicated yet." Flamby nodded, watching him wide-eyed. Her expression was inscrutable.

The level and plummet setting of the group exactly within the sides of the frame, with no suggestion of anything else existing in the world, puts it into the class of formal decoration, with which old masterdom abounds, and whence Wiertz received the inspiration for most of his great compositions.