Even as a pupil at the Antwerp Academy he wrote in a letter to his father contemptuously of his fellow-students' reverence for the old masters. "They imagine," said he, "that the old masters are invincible gods, and not men whom genius may surpass." And instead of admonishing him to be modest, his father answered with pride: "Be a model to the youth of the future, so that in later centuries young painters may say, 'I will raise myself to fame as the great Wiertz did in Belgium.'" Such dangerous flattery would have affected stronger characters. It needed only the Italian journey to send him altogether astray. Michael Angelo made him giddy, as had been the case with Cornelius, Chenavard, and many another. With all the ambition of a self-taught man he held every touch of his brush to be important, and was indignant if others refused to think the same. After his failures in Paris and Brussels he began to find high treason in every criticism, and started a discussion on "the pernicious influence of journalism upon art and literature." We find him saying: "If any one writes ill of me when I am dead, I will rise from the grave to defend myself." In his hatred of criticism he resolved to exhibit no more, lived a miserable existence till his death in 1865, and painted hasty and careless portraits, _pour la soupe_, when he was in pressing need of money. These brought him at first from three to four hundred, and later a thousand francs. He indulged in colossal sketches, for the completion of which the State built him in 1850 a tremendous studio, the present _Musée Wiertz_. It stands a few hundred paces from the Luxembourg station, to the extreme north of the town, in a beautiful though rather neglected little park, a white building with a pillared portico and a broad perron leading up to it. Here he sat in a fantastically gorgeous costume, for ever wearing his great Rubens hat. Philanthropic lectures on this world and the next, on the well-being of the people and the diseases of modern civilisation, were the fruits of his activity. Whoever loves painting for painting's sake need never visit the museum.