Here some more interesting Wiertz's pictures you won't easily find on the Web, for instance the two "devil mirror" pictures: "La coquette habillée" and "La coquette déshabillée" (click to enlarge). Looks kinda like a "pre-photoshop" trick, he :-)
Antoine-Joseph Wiertz (1806-1865) is now seen more as an early symbolist than as a late old master, but he surely knew how to paint, which won him the undeserved but widespread hate of the 'mafia degli scarabocchi'. Apart from such hate, he also easily won a 'Prix de Rome' (a price, note, that painters like Eugène Delacroix, Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas and Jacques-Louis David attempted without success).
Wiertz was a 'romantic surrealist', he was fascinated by death and horror. Some of his paintings have a Edgar Allan Poe touch.
It is worth noting that Wiertz despised money and lived without any physical confort, alone, in a small granary, and without any light in the evening.
To a guy that offered him a large amount of money for one of his studies, he famously replied:
"Keep your gold: it is the murderer of art!"
Ans since he never sold his paintings, you'll have to go to Brussels to see them. the only things that you can find elsewhere are some portraits that he painted as 'pot-boilers'. Wiertz's contempt -all his life long- for money and fortune was simply awesome.
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