176
EXPOSITION AT VIENNA.
bens, and like all copyists far behind his model, endowed with a lively, and to all intents, a diseased imagination, and governed by the most haughty conceit that ever possessed an artist, Wiertz’s life was one series of disappointments aud failures, and his pictures are but milestones of his toilsome life journey. Assembled now in the Wiertz Museum at Brussels, they form a sort of chamber of horrors, where the public goes to get a taste of the mysterious and the horrible, and young artists go to take a lesson from this great example of misapplied talents. The Fall of the Angels is a confused mass of nude figures, evidently inspired by Rubens,—flocks of very earthly angels, monsters breathing fire, streaks of lightning, precipices falling aud distortion and convulsion everywhere. It is a violent step from this picture to the methodical and logical, and consequently uninteresting and tame production of M. De Keyser, the director of the Academy at Antwerp, painted for the Museum of the Academicians in that city; Charles V. Delivering the Christian Slaves at Tunis is the subject. The really fine group of slaves has no distinctive character that marks their nationality, the emperor is posed with thorough academic formality aud there is a general chocolate tone over the whole picture. The artist has not taken advantage of the resources at his command, one of the most prominent of which is the grand opposition of tones in the flesh of the two sexes, and the work is much less meritorious than the frescoes in the vestibule of the Antwerp Museum completed by M. De Keyser about a year ago, after ten years of labor, and at a cost to the government of only 500,000 francs—a reward small enough in proportion to the real value of the works. J. F. Portaels, of Brussels, whose influence is noticeably great in the formation of a number of young artists who receive the benefit of his generous n 1 ' struction, exposed very little. One rather cold portrait, and The Young Witch , a dark-skinned maiden with a black oat on her shoulder, were the only ones seen bearing his name- One of his pupils, Emile Wauters, exposed two large historical scenes, very well studied, but not of remarkable strength of execution. Other pupils were also represented.
Of the pretentious works of Slingeneyer and Smidt, whose glowing canvases covered much space and possessed merit 8