The Cecil Whig. [volume] (Elkton, Md.) 1841-current, 1872-08-31
ANTOINE WIEITZ.


This man was great from his youngest
years. At ten he painted all he saw by the
sheer instinct of art, never having received
instruction of any sort, at twelve he en-.
graved on wood and painted off what he
engraved, none having ever shown him
the method of the work; it has been we'll
said that if, at fifteen, Pascal invented ge-
ometry, at twelve Wiertz invented draw
ing and engraving. At fourteen the boy
who beheld nothing in art but the poor
pictures of his parish church, heard of
Rubens, and knew no rest by night or day
until he set forth upon a pilgrimage to the
city which is at once the birthplace, the
tomb, and the apotheosis of Rubens.
| No one can be said to know Rubens in
any sense until that pilgrimage to Antwer-
pen has been made, but being once thus
known, the masculine majesty, the leoniue
strength, the imprisoned radiance of Ru-
bens' genius binds the pilgrim to worship
them for evermore. 1t needs no record to
tell us how they entranced and subjugated
the mind of the young Ardennais until tho
humility of his homage for his mighty mas
ter became united to the resolve, which all
his life long never left him, to create a
picture which should be not unworthy to
hang between the Descent and the Eleya
ton of the Cross.
This homage and this resolve together
chained him long in that old strange town
whose every stone seems to bear and every
bell to chime the name of Rubeps. The
tale of his life in Antwerpen is of the
strangest and most pathetic; it may 60
with the histories of Chatterton, of Gilbert,
and of Hegesippe Moreau. He had moth
ing in the world except two hundred for
ms yearly which the Government allowed
him for his promise as an art student. He
Inhabited sort of den in corner of q
granary, where in winter the cold was so
intense that his beard was often frozen to
the wall, against which stood his miser-
able bed, whilst the cell itself was so small
that being of tall stature he could never
hold himself upright in it.
Yet in this prison he remained many
years, peopling it with myriads of his
beautiful imagination, working all day at
his easel, and at night studying anatomy
and chemical science, or filling his solitude
with wild charivari of music of his own
creation, which was at once so melodious
and SO terrible that the affrighted people,
listening in the streets without, were GER
tain that the sound came from hell itself.
Thus he remained for half a score of
years. dwelling in a passionate ecstasy Of
spiritual life and in the most complete
wretchedness of physical existence. It
was during this time that he rejected a
price for his pictures on the plea that gold
was the murderer of art.
From Antwerpen he went to study in
Paris, thence to Rome; still poor as the
poorest and succored during illness at the
hospital of the poor. From Rome, having
stepped his mind in the wondrous lustre of
Italian air and of Italian art, he sent to his
own country as the fruits of his exile that
''Death of Patrocles,' in which his genius
reached its perihelion. which he never
afterwards surpassed and perhaps never
afterwards equalled.
The cost for carriage of this immense
is 80 feet in length-amounted to
50Of; the Academy, aghast, refused to pay
it, and were about to leave the canvas to
its fate, in the hole of the ship, when a
Fleming, whose name deserves eternal re-
cord, one Van Bree, struck with the mag
nificence of the Homeric conflict, paid the
harbor dues and redeemed the "Patrocles''
for Belgium.
1t was always the intention of Wiertz
to repaint this great subject; death came to
him with the intention unachieved; but it
must be doubted whether he could ever
have rivalled himself in it successfully
The canvas seems to breathe the very soul
of Homer. The Menelaus, with his eyes
attained, and his beard blown by tie fierce
breaths of war; the beautiful nude body
stretched amidst them, dissected as by
troop of lions and pack of wolves; the
young son of Panthus, who falls beneath
The steel like young olive-tree beneath
the axe; the perfection of the anatomy, the
life and haste and majestic ferocity of the
conflict; the innumerable tones given in the
flesh of the living warriors, and
The bruised pallor of the fallen dead; the
whole conception of the composition, into
which a passionate love and instinct for
The Homeric age has been poured in flood
Of heroic feeling; all these together form
work upon which, surely, none can look
without emotion, and by which Wiertz
nay be said, without arrogance or pre-
sumption, to have accomplished the ambi-
ion of his life-de lutter contre Rubens.-
London Society.
THE Observation-Disclosures, New Jer-
ey, with population of ten thousand,
,aid its nO1ice fOroa Last vaor 31d- ond tb~