human
Van der Werff. How theatrically the figures are posturing, how improbable is the composition, and what an unwholesome dose of sentimentality is to be found in that burgomaster, who is offering himself as a prey to the multitude! The heads are those of troubadours. And these jerkins brought fresh out of the wardrobe, these neatly ironed white ruffles, all this rich velvet and glittering pomp, how little it resembles the torn rags of a half-starved people after a nine months' siege! His revolutionary picture of 1834 is an unfortunate transposition into a sentimental key of the
gpt
Freedom on the Barricades by Delacroix. Here also are play-actors rather than men and women of the people. This old man who is kissing the banner, the wife who winds her arms about her husband as Venus does about Tannhäuser, the pale girl who has fallen in a faint, the warrior who, with his eyes turned up to Heaven, is breaking his sword--these are figures out of a melodrama, not revolutionaries storming the barricades, nor famishing artisans fighting for their very existence. And the thin, spick-and-span colouring is in just as striking a contrast with the forceful action of the scene. An idyll could not be carried out with more prettiness of manner than is this picture which represents the rising of a people. The artisans are as white as alabaster. A light rouge rests upon the cheeks of the women, as when Boucher paints the faltering of virtue. And afterwards Wappers' course went further and further down hill. Only in these two early works, in which he responded to a political movement by an artistic endeavour, does he seem, in a certain sense, individual and powerful. All the others are stereotyped productions which, having nothing to do with the Belgian national movement, have all the more to do with the Parisian _École du bon sens_. Even his
human
Christ in the Grave,