Antoine Joseph Wiertz, a Belgian painter, born in Dinant, Feb. 22, 1806, died in Brussels, June 18, 1865. He was born of poor parents, and received no early instruction, but when only four years old he sketched with rapidity; at the age of 10 he painted a portrait, and at 12 engraved on wood and printed his own pictures. He went to Antwerp in 1820, and, after working for several years in poverty, finished his studies at the academy of Antwerp, under Matthew van Brée, and took the grand prize for painting. In 1834 he went to Rome as a pensioner of the Antwerp academy, and in 1835 sent to Antwerp his " Greeks and Trojans contending for the Body of Patroglus," painted on a canvas 20 by 30 ft. This picture was sent to the Paris academy for exhibition, and was refused admission, whereupon Wiertz forged his own name on a veritable Rubens and sent that to Paris. This also was refused, when the artist revenged himself by writing La critique en mature d'art, estelle possible? In 1840 his Eoge de Rubens received the medal offered by the Antwerp academy for the best essay on Rubens. Convinced that trade was death to art, he resolved never to sell any of his pictures, and only occasionally did he paint a portrait to procure means of subsistence.

His "Patroclus" was quickly followed by "The Brigand," " The Carnival of Rome," "The Revolt of Hell against Heaven," " The Education of the "Virgin," and " The Triumph of Christ." The last picture, which was on a canvas 50 by 30 ft., was received with so much favor that the government built for him a large studio in Brussels, after designs made by him from one of the ruined temples at Paestum, on condition that he would leave his pictures to the state. Since his death this has constituted the Wiertz museum, in which all his works are. exhibited. Wiertz established himself in it in 1848, and afterward painted some of his most characteristic pictures, dealing largely in the grotesque and the horrible. Among these are " Thoughts and Visions of a Head cut off," "A Second after Death," "Precipitate Inhumation," "A Scene in Hell," "The Child Burned," "Hunger, Folly, and Crime," and "The Birth of the Passions." He painted also " Christ at the Tomb," " The Man of the Future regarding the Things of the Past," and " The Last Cannon," representing the triumph of civilization over war. Many of these pictures are painted in a style invented by him and named peinture mate, combining the qualities of fresco and oil colors.

In 1865 a commission appointed by the Belgian government to investigate its merits reported adversely. An essay by Wiertz entitled L'ecole flamande de peinture, was crowned by the royal academy of Belgium in 1863. He bequeathed his pictures to the nation, but did not leave money enough to pay his funeral expenses.