David on his arrival needed only to shake the tree and the fruit fell ripe into his lap. He entered Flanders like a conqueror, and left the signs of ravage behind him on his triumphal progress. In Brussels a court gathered round him as round a banished king, and a gold medal was struck in memory of his arrival. He took Flemish art in his powerful hands and crushed it. For, needless to say, he saw nothing but barbarism in the genius of Rubens, and inoculated Flemish artists with a genuine horror of their great prince of painters. He continued to teach in Brussels what he had preached in Paris, and became the father-in-law of a deadly tiresome Franco-Belgian school, to which belonged a succession of correct painters; men such as Duvivier, Ducq, Paelinck, Odevaere, and others. For the aboriginal, sturdy, energetic, and carnal Flemish art was prescribed the mathematical regularity of the antique canon. The old Flemish joyousness of colour passed into a consumptive cacophony. And then was repeated in Belgium the tragedy which Classicism had played in France. Everything became a pretext for draperies, stiff poses, sculptural groupings, and plaster heads. Phædra and Theseus, Hector and Andromache, Paris and Helen, were, as in Paris, the most popular subjects. And so great a confusion reigned, that a sculptor from whom a wolf was ordered included the history of Romulus and Remus gratuitously.

The only one whose works are still partially enjoyable is Navez. He was, like Ingres in France, the last prop of this art, chiselled, as it were, out of stone; and even after the fall of Classicism he remained in esteem, because, like Ingres, he knew how to steer a prudent course between David, the Italians, and a certain independent study of nature. A touch of realism was mingled with his mania for the Greeks; only to a limited extent did he correct “ugly” nature; he would have ventured to represent Socrates with his negro nose and Thersites with his hump, and, again, like Ingres he has left behind him enduring performances as a portrait painter. His correct, cold, and discreet talent grew warm at the touch of human personality, and his drawings, in particular, prove that he had warmth of feeling as an artist. As his biographer tells us, he seldom laid down the sketch-book in which he fixed his impressions as he talked. Every page was filled with sketches of a group, a figure, or a gesture seen in the street and rapidly dashed off, “as realistically as even Courbet could desire.” And these he transferred, when he painted in the “noble style.”

As Navez had importance as an artist, so had Matthias van Bree—Herreyns’ successor in the directorate of the Antwerp Academy—importance as a teacher. He worked in Belgium, like Gros in Paris, only in another way. While Gros as an artist was the forerunner of Romanticism, and as a teacher an orthodox Classicist, Van Bree is tedious as an artist, but as a teacher he fanned in the young generation a glowing love for old Flemish art. No one spoke of Rubens, Van Dyck, and the great art of the seventeenth century with so much warmth and understanding; and whilst with the charcoal in his hand he composed buckram cartoons, he dreamt of a youth who should arise to renew the old Flemish tradition.

Before long this young man had grown up. He had seen the artistic treasures of Antwerp and Paris. Here Rubens had delighted his eyes, and there Paul Veronese. As he admired both in the Louvre, he heard behind him the voice of the young Romanticists who, like him, had an enthusiasm for colour and movement, and blasphemed the stiff, colourless old David. Gustav Wappers, also, had paid toll to Classicism, and painted in 1823 a “Regulus” after the well-known recipe. All the greater was the astonishment when, in 1830, he came forward with his “Burgomaster van der Werff”: “Burgomaster van der Werff of Leyden, at the siege of the town in 1576, offers his own body as food to the famished citizens.” The very subject could not fail to create enthusiasm in the great body of the people, excited as they were by ideas of liberty: the brilliant method of presentation did this no less. What the old Van Bree looked for, the return to the splendour of colour and sensuous fulness of life of the old masters, was achieved in this picture. In the same year, when Belgium had won her nationality and independence once more, a painter also ventured to break away from the French formulæ of Classicism, and to treat a national theme in the manner of those painters who in former centuries had been the glory of Flanders. Wappers was greeted as a national hero; his part it was to bring to an issue with the brush that good fight which others had fought with the musket and sabre. His picture was a sign of the delivery of Flemish art from the French house of bondage. Whilst older men were horrified, as the followers of the school of Delaroche were afterwards horrified at the “Stone-breakers” of Courbet, the younger generation looked up to Wappers as a Messiah. Everything in the Brussels Salon faded before the freshness of the new work; a springtide in painting seemed to be at hand, and the wintry rigidity of Classicism was warmed by a burst of sunshine, the old gods trembled and felt their Olympus quake. Gustav Wappers was held to be the leader of a new Renaissance. In him the great era of the seventeenth century was to be continued. The iridescence of silken stuffs, the whole colour and festal joyousness of the old masters, were found once more. As in France there rose the shout, “An Ingres, a Delacroix!” so there resounded in Belgium the battle-cry, “A Navez, a Wappers!” The picture was bought by King William II of Holland, and in 1832 Wappers was made Professor of the Antwerp Academy.

Bruyllant, Brussels.
GUSTAV WAPPERS.

The Exhibition of 1834 confirmed him in his new position as head of a school. This was a genuine triumph, which he gained by his “Episode in the Belgian Revolution of 1830.” A scene out of the blood-stained days of the street fights in Brussels—that glorious final chapter of the struggle of the Belgian people for freedom from the French yoke—was nothing less than an event in which every one had recently taken part. At a period when so few realised how closely the great masters of the past were bound to their own time and imbibed from it their strength and nourishment, this new painter, in defiance of all theories, had drawn boldly from life. This picture was regarded as “a hymn of jubilation for what was attained and a threnody for the sacrifice it had cost.” And the neighbourhood of the church, where he had laid the action, stamped it almost as the votive picture of the Belgian people for its dead. On the right an artisan standing aloft upon a newly thrown up earthwork is reading to his attentive comrades the rejected proclamation of the Prince of Orange. On the left a reinforcement is coming up. In the foreground boys are tearing up the pavement or beating the drum; and here and there are enacted various tragical family scenes. Here a young wife with a child on her arm clings with all the strength of despair to her husband, who resists her and finally tears himself from her grasp and hurries to the barricade—the cry of love is drowned amid the clash of arms. There, supported on the knee of his grey-headed father, rests a handsome young fellow with closing eyes and the death-wound in his heart. It seems as though the Horatian dulce et decorum est might be said to wander over his features and to glorify them. For patriotism as well as for mere sentiment, here are noble scenes enough and to spare. Not only all Brussels, but all Belgium, made a pilgrimage to Wappers’ creation. Every mother beheld her lost son in the youth in the foreground whose life has been sacrificed; every artisan’s wife sought her husband, her brother, or her father amongst the figures of the fighting-men on the barricades. All the newspapers were full of praise, and a subscription was set on foot to strike a medal in commemoration of the picture. If, up to this time, Wappers had been merely praised as the renewer of Belgian art, he was now placed alongside of the greatest masters. Thiers induced him to exhibit in Paris the much discussed work, the fame of which had passed beyond the boundaries of Belgium. The “Episode” made a triumphal tour of all the great towns of Europe before it found its home in the Musée Moderne; and Wappers’ fame abroad increased yet more his celebrity in Flanders. Thanks to him, the neighbouring nations began to interest themselves in the Belgian school. All were united in admiration of “the mighty conception and the harmonious scheme of colour.” The German Morgenblatt published a study of him in 1836. Wappers counted as the leading painter of his country.

Bruyllant, Brussels.
WAPPERS.THE SACRIFICE OF BURGOMASTER VAN DER WERFF AT THE SIEGE OF LEYDEN.

Yet the same year brought him his first rivals. His entry on the stage had given strength to a group of young painters belonging to the same courageous movement, and the Brussels Salon of 1836 concentrated their efforts. Nicaise de Keyzer made his appearance in heavy armour. As early as 1834 he had come forward with a great picture, a Crucifixion, in which he desired to compete with Rubens, as it seemed, in the latter’s most special province. Yet the work merely testified to its author’s excellent memory: the majority of the heads, gestures, and draperies had been made use of in old pictures in precisely the same fashion. Consciously or not, he had copied fragments direct, and welded them together in a new composition. If, in spite of this, the name of de Keyzer already flew from mouth to mouth, he owed it to the nimbus of romance which irradiated his person. The story went that an Antwerp lady on one of her walks had seen a young man drawing in the sand, while his flock was at pasture not far off. She stepped up and offered him a pencil, and he, a new Cimabue, began forthwith to sketch a picture of the Madonna. The drawing was so beautiful (so the tale ran) that the lady would have held it a sin to allow the genius to end his days as a shepherd. He came to town, received instruction, and learned to paint. A little idyll illuminated by the amiability of a lady was quite enough to prepare a friendly reception for De Keyzer. And since he, like a tractable, modest young man, hearkened attentively to criticism, he satisfied all desires when, in 1836, he came forward with his “Battle of the Spurs at Courtrai, 1302.” In its quiet elegance the work answered to the peaceful mood which prevailed once more after the days of revolt and political insurrection. He was given special credit for clearness of composition and antiquarian exactness. De Keyzer had chosen the moment when the Count of Artois was expiring on the knees of a Flemish soldier; another Fleming had his arm raised to protect his general from the approaching French. For the rest, there is a lull in the fight, though the battlefield in the background is indicated with the minuteness of an historian: none of those carnages of blood and smoke of which the world was grown once more weary, but a correct, well-disciplined battle, a skilful composition of fine gestures, helmets, cuirasses, and halberts. Even the Count’s spur, says Alvin, is drawn after the original, the only remaining spur out of seven hundred which lay scattered on the field after the day of Courtrai.

In the same year Henri Decaisne completed his “Belges Illustres.” The famous past was supposed to give its blessing to the great present. The artist, who in Paris had painted portraits with success, had been esteemed there by Lamartine, and celebrated by Alfred de Musset in a brilliant article in the Revue des Deux Mondes, now gratified a long cherished desire of the Belgian national pride when he united the heroes of the land in an ideal gathering.

Soon afterwards Gallait and Bièfve trod the stage of Belgian painting. In point of size their pictures surpassed all that that age, accustomed as it was to vast canvases, had yet witnessed. “The Abdication of Charles V” measured twenty feet; it was hung in the Salon Carré of the Louvre above Paul Veronese’s “Marriage at Cana.” An entire court of great ladies and gentlemen, clad in velvet and brocade, move in the gorgeous hall of state of a king’s castle. The solemn moment is represented when Charles V, erect and dominating the entire assembly, cedes the government of his possessions to Philip: and here is a mine of profound criticism of the philosophy of history. This old man, with one foot in the grave, whose forceful head still bears, like a Caryatid, the heavy burden of empire, embodies the splendour, fame, and might of bygone days. Faltering, he steps down from the throne, as though hesitating at the last moment whether he should appoint as his successor this son whom he both loves and fears; and, lifting to heaven his tired, sunken eyes, he commends unto God the future of the realm. Philip, the only one in the assembly entirely clothed in black, who receives the gift of dominion with an icy coldness, is transformed by the able exegesis of the critics into the satanic demon conjuring up the powers of hell. The picture even gives a glimpse into the future. For as he speaks Charles leans his left hand upon the shoulder of another young man, William of Orange. This indicates that soon the nation will wrest their independence from the double-tongued Jesuitical policy of Philip. To the left of this central group, robed in velvet and silk, stand the ladies around Margaret, the sister of the Emperor; she, in the garb of a nun, sits in her chair as in a prie-dieu. To the right, near the throne, are pages and priests, and amidst them Egmont and Horn, standing aloof and silent, look upon the scene. “The Abdication” had a grand success. It confirmed the hopes which had been set on Gallait ever since the completion of his “Tasso,” and it was proudly ranked amongst those works which did special honour to the young nation. Wappers saw himself eclipsed, and Louis Gallait took the lead.