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Tues-Fri 10am-noon & 1-5pm; alternate weekends 10am-noon & 1-5pm; free. tel 02 648 17 18. Metro: Trone . Behind the European Parliament building at rue Vautier 62 - head right from the entrance, then swing left up the slope - the Musee Wiertz is devoted to the works of one of the city's most distinctive, if disagreeable, nineteenth-century artists. Once immensely popular - so much so that Thomas Hardy in Tess of the d'Urbervilles could write of "the staring and ghastly attitudes of a Wiertz museum" - Antoine-Joseph Wiertz (1806-65) painted religious and mythological canvases, featuring gory hells and strapping nudes, as well as fearsome scenes of human madness and suffering. The core of the museum is housed in his studio , a large, airy space that was built for him by the Belgian state on the understanding that he bequeathed his oeuvre to the nation. Pictures include The Burnt Child, The Thoughts and Visions of a Severed Head and a small but especially gruesome Suicide - not for the squeamish. There are also a number of smaller, quite elegantly painted quasi-erotic pieces featuring coy nudes, and a colossal Triumph of Christ , a melodramatic painting of which Wiertz was inordinately proud. Three adjoining rooms contain further macabre works, such as Premature Burial and (the most appalling of them all) his Hunger, Folly, Crime , in which a madwoman is pictured shortly after hacking off her child's leg and throwing it into the cooking pot. Mercifully, there is some more restrained stuff here too, including several portraits and more saucy girls in various states of undress. Wiertz eventually came to believe that he was a better painter than his artistic forebears, Rubens and Michelangelo. Judge for yourself.
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