Antoine Joseph Wiertz (1806–1865) was a Belgian painter, one of the great eccentrics in the history of art. In 1832 he won the Belgian Prix de Rome and when he visited Italy in 1834 he was overwhelmed by Michelangelo. His other great artistic hero was Rubens and he tried to follow in their footsteps with enormous and high-flown religious, historical, and allegorical canvases.
The results now seem almost dementedly bombastic and melodramatic, but he had many admirers among his countrymen. The Belgian government was keen to promote a national school of painting and in 1850–1 built him a special studio in Brussels (now the Musée Wiertz). He worked there in isolation for the rest of his life, regarding himself as an artist-philosopher and totally convinced of his own genius. Some of his work is erotic or macabre in character and presages Belgian Symbolism
Confliction opinion
For a painter/sculptor who is still largely unrecognised outside his native Belgium, Antoine Joseph Wiertz Self Portrait certainly divides opinion. The art dictionaries and encylopedias that bother to mention him in their brief entries variously describe his work as banal, melodramatic, morbid, mystical, ambitious. Opinions about the artist himself are equally conflicting, ranging from visionary, eccentric, to meglomaniacal.
Magical Eroticism
The work chosen to lead one into this shadowy world is The Young Witch (aka The Young Sorceress; La jeune Sorcière) of 1857. Wiertz's painting is suitably charged with a combination of innocence, overt sexuality, grotesquerie, and supernatural danger. Those lecherous faces in the top left corner remind us that we too are voyeurs of this curious scene, lit by the voluptuous fleshtones of Wiertz's nubile temptress, who is provocatively 'penetrated' by that thrusting, phallic broomstick. The tension arising from the artist's cunning juxtaposition of painterly classicism and somewhat crude titillation invests the work with a striking, magical eroticism.
Extreme States of consciousness
A second encounter with Wiertz's work came via another book cover - the 1978 Penguin Classics edition of Lautréamont's Maldoror and Poems. This time the painting was The Premature Burial (aka Buried Alive; Inhumation précipitée) of 1854. Art commentator, Jeffery Howe, suggests that Wiertz was inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, in whose fiction premature burial is a recurring theme
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| Antoine Joseph Wiertz Autoportrait, c.1835-36 |
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| Double portrait of the artist and his father |
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| Allegory with Skull, c.1824 |
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| La mère de l'artiste, c.1832 |
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| Greeks and Trojans Fighting over the Body of Patroclus, c.1836 |
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| Esmeralda, c.1839 |
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| Quasimodo, c.1839 |
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| The Fable of the Three Wishes — Human Insatiability, c.1839 |
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| Le jeune Noir, c.1840-45 |
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| La chute des mauvais anges c.1842 |
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| La jolie jardinière, c.1845-50 |
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| Portrait de Monsieur Greindl, c.1845-50 |
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| Portrait de Madame Greindl, c.1845-50 |
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| Etude pour "Confidence" c.1846 |
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| The confidence, c.1848 |
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| The beautiful Rosine, c.1847 |
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| Amours et Papillon, c.1848-50 |
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| Les Partis jugés par le Christ, c.1850-55 |
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| Hunger, Madness, Crime, c.1853 |
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| La liseuse de romans, c.1853 |
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| The premature burial, c.1854 |
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| The crucifixion of Peter, c.1855 |
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| La jeune sorcière, c.1857 |
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| Etude pour "On se retrouve au ciel" c.1859 |
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| Portrait de Maria Merten, c.1860 |
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| The Triumph of Light, c.1862 |
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| A Scene from Hell, c.1864 |
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| Civilization in the 19th Century, c.1864 |
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| Le bouton de rose, c.1864 |
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