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Regulus after the well-known recipe. All the greater was the astonishment when, in 1830, he came forward with his
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Burgomaster van der Werff :
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Burgomaster van der Werff of Leyden, at the siege of the town in 1576, offers his own body as food to the famished citizens. The very subject could not fail to create enthusiasm in the great body of the people, excited as they were by ideas of liberty: the brilliant method of presentation did this no less. What the old Van Bree looked for, the return to the splendour of colour and sensuous fulness of life of the old masters, was achieved in this picture. In the same year, when Belgium had won her nationality and independence once more, a painter also ventured to break away from the French formulæ of Classicism, and to treat a national theme in the manner of those painters who in former centuries had been the glory of Flanders. Wappers was greeted as a national hero; his part it was to bring to an issue with the brush that good fight which others had fought with the musket and sabre. His picture was a sign of the delivery of Flemish art from the French house of bondage. Whilst older men were horrified, as the followers of the school of Delaroche were afterwards horrified at the
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Stone-breakers of Courbet, the younger generation looked up to Wappers as a Messiah. Everything in the Brussels Salon faded before the freshness of the new work; a springtide in painting seemed to be at hand, and the wintry rigidity of Classicism was warmed by a burst of sunshine, the old gods trembled and felt their Olympus quake. Gustav Wappers was held to be the leader of a new Renaissance. In him the great era of the seventeenth century was to be continued. The iridescence of silken stuffs, the whole colour and festal joyousness of the old masters, were found once more. As in France there rose the shout,
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An Ingres, a Delacroix! so there resounded in Belgium the battle-cry,
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A Navez, a Wappers!