One blustery Sunday in February we made our way over to the Antoine Wiertz museum. This guy did some of the most epic and ghoulish paintings from the 19th century as I've ever seen, many with strongly moralistic themes: a woman who went crazy with hunger and chopped up her infant for the stew pot; people shooting their own or others' heads off; a woman vainly preening in a mirror while the devil leers at her; and a monumental work entitled "Last Thoughts and Visions of a Decapitated Head". Not terribly subtle, but interesting. He was also somewhat of an eccentric, rejecting Paris as the center of artistic thought and re-envisioning it as a suburb to the new artistic capital of Brussels. He also did away with oils in many of his works in favor of a recipe of his own creation that gave his paintings a more matte appearance. While the pieces done in oil are well-preserved, the other works are slowly reverting to darkness, like Polaroids in reverse. He somehow scammed Belgian government into housing and displaying his art in perpetuity, and it's clear from the water stains on the deteriorating paintings and other signs of disrepair that they've resented the imposition ever since.