Nestled at the heart of Brussels's Léopold Quarter, today dominated by the buildings of the European Parliament, the Wiertz Museum still retains all the nineteenth-century charm of the Romantic painter's residence-cum-workplace. Built between 1851 and 1861 with funding from the Belgian government, it houses almost the entire output of Antoine Wiertz (1806-1865), who intended the building, with its residential quarters, its luminous studio and vast, wooded garden, not only as a home and a space of artistic creation, but as a haven and place of renewal for later artists, and, above all, as a showcase for his own ambitious and grandiloquent works.

Wiertz, who dreamed of rivalling with Rubens, of outdoing Raphael, left a substantial corpus that can leave no visitor indifferent. From monumental canvases sometimes intimidating in scale to the most delicate of oil sketches, this brief study offers an opportunity to discover the genius of this Belgian artist, winner of the Prix de Rome in 1832 and champion of a universal art, moral, social and patriotic in its aspirations.