The Old Lady Dreaming, by N. Maes, and the Jan Steen (The Operator) are good though not remarkable examples.  Jacob Jordaenses flood the various galleries; Rubens run to seed as far as quality, yet exhibiting enormous muscularity, is the trait of this gross painter.  The King Drinks—­his kings are always drinking or blind drunk—­his nudes, which look like the contents of the butcher shops in Brussels, attract throngs, for the anecdote is writ large across the wall, and you don’t have to run to read.  Panoramas would be a better title for these robust compositions.  David Teniers’s La Kermesse is the most important work he ever finished.  It is in good preservation.  Amsterdam has not its superior.  There is an ordinary El Greco, a poor Goya, and a Ribera downstairs.  The French art is not enlivening.

Philip Champaigne’s self-portrait is familiar:  it has been reproduced frequently.  Jean Baptiste Huysmans, a landscape with animals; he is said to be an ancestor of the late Joris Karel Huysmans.  The Mors (Antonio Moro) is of value.  But the lodestone of the collection is the Primitives.

The pictures in the modern gallery are largely Belgian, some French, and a few Dutch and English.  It is not a collection of artistic significance.  In the black-and-white room may be seen a few original drawings of Rops.

The Musee Wiertz is worth visiting only as a chamber of horrors.  When Wiertz is not morbid and repulsive he is of the vasty inane, a man of genius gone daft, obsessed by the mighty shades of Rubens and Michael Angelo.  Wiertz was born in 1806 and died in 1865.  The Belgian Government, in order to make some sort of reparation for its neglect of the painter during his troubled and unhappy lifetime, acquired his country residence and made it a repository of his art.  The pictures are of a scale truly heroic.  The painter pitted himself against Rubens and Michael Angelo.  He said:  “I, too, am a great painter!” And there is no denying his power.  His tones recall the pate of Rubens without its warmth and splendour.  When Wiertz was content to keep within bounds his portraits and feminine nudes are not without beauty.  He was fanciful rather than poetic, and the picture of Napoleon in hell enduring the reproaches of his victims (why should they be there?) is startling.  Startling, too, are the tricks played on your nerves by the peepholes.  You see a woman crazed by hunger about to cook one of her murdered children; beheaded men, men crushed by superior power, the harnessed body of Patroclus, Polyphemus devouring the companions of Ulysses, and other monstrous conceptions, are all painted with reference to the ills of the poor.  Anton Joseph was a socialist in sentiment.  If his executive ability had been on a par with his ideas, and if those ideas had been less extravagant, the world would have had one more great painter; but his nervous system was flawed and he died a melancholic, a victim to misplaced ideals.  He wished to revive the heroic age at a time of easel pictures.  He, the half genius, saw himself outwitted by the sleek paint of Alfred Stevens.  Born out of his due time, a dreamer of dreams, Wiertz is a sad example of the futility of looking backward in art.