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Episode in the Belgian Revolution of 1830. A scene out of the blood-stained days of the street fights in Brussels--that glorious final chapter of the struggle of the Belgian people for freedom from the French yoke--was nothing less than an event in which every one had recently taken part. At a period when so few realised how closely the great masters of the past were bound to their own time and imbibed from it their strength and nourishment, this new painter, in defiance of all theories, had drawn boldly from life. This picture was regarded as
gpt
And the neighbourhood of the church, where he had laid the action, stamped it almost as the votive picture of the Belgian people for its dead. On the right an artisan standing aloft upon a newly thrown up earthwork is reading to his attentive comrades the rejected proclamation of the Prince of Orange. On the left a reinforcement is coming up. In the foreground boys are tearing up the pavement or beating the drum; and here and there are enacted various tragical family scenes. Here a young wife with a child on her arm clings with all the strength of despair to her husband, who resists her and finally tears himself from her grasp and hurries to the barricade--the cry of love is drowned amid the clash of arms. There, supported on the knee of his grey-headed father, rests a handsome young fellow with closing eyes and the death-wound in his heart. It seems as though the Horatian _dulce et decorum est_ might be said to wander over his features and to glorify them. For patriotism as well as for mere sentiment, here are noble scenes enough and to spare. Not only all Brussels, but all Belgium, made a pilgrimage to Wappers' creation. Every mother beheld her lost son in the youth in the foreground whose life has been sacrificed; every artisan's wife sought her husband, her brother, or her father amongst the figures of the fighting-men on the barricades. All the newspapers were full of praise, and a subscription was set on foot to strike a medal in commemoration of the picture. If, up to this time, Wappers had been merely praised as the renewer of Belgian art, he was now placed alongside of the greatest masters. Thiers induced him to exhibit in Paris the much discussed work, the fame of which had passed beyond the boundaries of Belgium. The
human
Episode made a triumphal tour of all the great towns of Europe before it found its home in the Musée Moderne; and Wappers' fame abroad increased yet more his celebrity in Flanders. Thanks to him, the neighbouring nations began to interest themselves in the Belgian school. All were united in admiration of