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Wappers, (Egidius Karel) Gustaf [Gustave], Baron
(b Antwerp, 23 Aug 1803; d Paris, 6 Dec 1874). Belgian painter and teacher. He studied at the Antwerp Academie under Mathieu Van Brée, from whom he gained a taste for large-scale history painting and an admiration of Peter Paul Rubens. His first subjects were strictly classical (e.g. Regulus, 1823) and, like Van Brée, he illustrated episodes from the life of the great Flemish painters (e.g. Van Dyck and his Model, 1827; Amsterdam, Rijksmus.). He also painted a few portraits (e.g. Portrait of a Lady, 1828; Antwerp, Kon. Mus. S. Kst.). He exhibited his first work at the Salon of 1822 in Ghent. In 1824 he went to the Netherlands to look at works by the Old Masters, and from 1826 to 1829 he lived in Paris, during which time he ceased to exhibit at the Belgian Salons. In Paris he frequented the studios of such Romantic artists as Paul Delaroche and Horace Vernet but felt intimidated by the more audacious manner of Eugène Delacroix. When he reappeared at the Salon of 1830 in Brussels, his Sacrifice of the Burgomaster van der Werff (Utrecht, Cent. Mus.) was received enthusiastically. Although the subject had already been treated by Van Brée, Wappers cast it in a new Romantic light that reflected his time in Paris. This appealed to his Brussels audience, but the weighty, patriotic content of the work also encouraged claims that Wappers was a genius who had rediscovered a distinctively Belgian national art. Since July of that year Paris had been in the throes of revolution, and in Brussels unrest was brewing that finally broke out in September. In this tense atmosphere it was perhaps understandable that even such a mediocre work should have been so enthusiastically misinterpreted as leading the contemporary Belgian revolt against foreign artistic influences. For the same reason François-Joseph Navez, the head of the Belgian Neo-classical school and a disciple of Jacques-Louis David, was widely attacked when his Athalia Questioning Joash (Brussels, Mus. A. Anc.) was hung opposite Wappers’s picture at the Salon of 1830 in Brussels. In the following months Wappers hardened his anti-classical stance and turned Navez (by now his sworn enemy) and his followers into objects of derision.
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- Wappers, (Egidius Karel) Gustaf, Baron
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