ART IN BRUSSELS.

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 22, 21 October 1907, Page 10

ART IN BRUSSELS.

A WELLINGTONIAN'S IMPRESSIONS. r AVriting f:om Boulovardo do Waterloc 11 Brussels, on August 2!), Miss Joan Hislof 0 the .daughter of His Worship tho Mayor an> i- Mrs. Hislop, aays in tho course of a letter :- r "Via have been to some good picture gal i- lencs and have seen some wonderfully powei ~ ful and stnkine pictures, but I do not lov them like 1 did tho British National Galler ones, because so many of them arc coarse f some of tlio Rubens, particularly so, and yo _ they are very clever, and the figures am f flosh tints are marvellous, but most of ther ' treat of drunken feasts, and so on. Ruben ~ lias soma portraits and scriptural scenes tha c aro very beautiful. There aro some wonder e ful Vandykes, too, which. I did enjoy—one, o an old woman, one could look at. all day. y- I also saw some of Quehtin Wirta's pic 1 tares. I remembered an old German boo! > which contained his love story, and h. seemed like an old friend to me. It i £ astonishing the way the colours have kep v in these old pictures. Some of them ar ° extremely old and really they look awfull; ~ funny—such quaint stilT landscapes, quee . prancing horses, and very stiff people. Ther ~ are a great , many inspirational scriptural aiv Madonna pictures, but not so many of th a I'lemisli as the Italian school of painting C There is one gallery devoted solely to Wirtz' b pictures, and you cannot conceive whatsoni 3 of them arc like. ' I managed to obtain ■i book of engravings of them, so you'll seo th J true awfulness ot them. Some are so dread 1 ful and , gave people such shocks that the; are covered in, and one looks at them wit! • ono eye'through a holo in the wall. I though J it seemed a very inartistic idea, and I'd mucl rather have looked at them as at more or 5 dinary pictures. It was hard to believe tha tho figures are not, at least, wax figures, si I marvellously did they seem to stand out o . tho canvas. There was one of a man sup s posed to be buried alive. He had worke , the lid off his coffin with one skinny hand , and his awful death-like face looked full a . you with a look of horror. It was simpl, . brutally morbid. 'There was another > little worse that I've, dreamt of twice since ■ But there are others of enormous sizo dealin; • with ela'sical and Biblical subjects that wor " beautiful because their colouring'was so nice • and the flesh tints aud figures' so natural ' and in some the faces are ver ' lovely, but even in most of these there i something queers, and distorted that make his art seem that of a half-mad genius.' H was an eccentric man yho would never dc base (as ho thought) his art by selling any . thing for money, and he practically died o : starvation, though the nation did a lot fo i him. He had a fearful horros of war, ani many of liis pictures aro protests against it Ono represents Napoleon in, hell surroundei by his victims, some holding up their, cut off limbs, mothers their children, and sue like, all crowding round him. lit is as force ful as it is clever, as all his, pictures arc but in a way they arc all, to my mind, tingei with madness and morbidness."