Flemish painter, born at Dinant, Belgium, on the 22nd of February 1806; entered the Antwerp Art School in 1820, and after studying several years at Rome settled in Brussels in 1848. During that portion of his career prior to 1848, his ideal was the uniting of the excellencies of Rubens and Michaelangelo, as is shown in his paintings The Fight of Greeks and Trojans Round the Dead Body of Patroclus (1835); The Disobedient Angels; The Flight Into Egypt; and The Triumph of Christ (1848), the last being thirty by fifty feet, while all were very large canvases. He once held up to the ridicule of Europe the judges of a certain Paris exhibition, who had rejected a genuine Rubens he had sent them, marked with his own initials. In 1847 the Belgian government built him a studio which is still open to the public as the Musée Wiertz, and where most of his paintings are to be seen. In 1848–50 he developed a new technical method of painting, peinture mate, a combination of the qualities of fresco and oil work. He now began the production of totally different subjects, such outcomes of a morbid imagination as A Second After Death; Napoleon in Hell; Precipitate Inhumation; and Visions of a Head Cut Off. He also painted some eccentric genre pictures, as Quasimodo and The Young Witch. He wrote a Eulogy on Rubens (1840) and a Memoir on Flemish Painting (1863). He supported himself by portrait-painting, bequeathing all his descriptive paintings to the state. He died in Brussels on the 18th of June 1865.
