Young Artist Daydreaming

It was in 1857 that Gustaf Wappers, who had been in Paris since 1853 and moved in the court circles around Napoleon III, painted this sentimental picture set in the 18th century of a Young artist daydreaming. At first sight it appears to be a gallant and charming scene. The bright colour palette of white, pale blue and pink recalls…

It was in 1857 that Gustaf Wappers, who had been in Paris since 1853 and moved in the court circles around Napoleon III, painted this sentimental picture set in the 18th century of a Young artist daydreaming. At first sight it appears to be a gallant and charming scene. The bright colour palette of white, pale blue and pink recalls light-hearted Rococo creations. But on closer inspection one is struck by the young woman’s brooding gaze. She has interrupted her painting and is staring in front of her. On the unfinished canvas three youngsters armed with bows and arrows are merrily tumbling through the air. They are winged Erotes or love gods. The young woman has given one of them a death’s-head mask, expressing her own longing for death. There is a drawn design for this picture in a private Antwerp collection. It is one of three composition sketches that are listed in the sale catalogue of Wappers’s estate as La fille du peintre de Vanloo (‘the daughter of the painter Van Loo’), which pins the subject down more precisely. The young paintress was modelled on Caroline van Loo, the daughter of the painter Carle van Loo (1705-1765), whose biography by Arsène Houssaye appeared in the French journal Revue des Deux Mondes in 1842. In it Houssaye reported how Caroline’s father encountered his depressed daughter in the studio a few days before her death while she was drawing the figure of Death, which she had given her own features. This tragic story, with all its mal de vivre and longing for death, was a challenging subject for a Romantic artist like Gustaf Wappers. As a young artist who soon made a name for himself, and was director of the Antwerp academy from 1840 to 1853, Wappers had no time for fashionable Neoclassicism. He did not idolise the ideals of classical art, but preferred subjects from Belgian national history instead. He also imitated the style of 16th and 17th-century masters. With his monumental canvases of The self-sacrifice of Mayor Van den der Werff (1829, Centraal Museum, Utrecht, inv. no. 2270) and Episode of the September days 1830 on the Grote Markt in Brussels (1835, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, inv. no. 2692) he not only caused a sensation but also confirmed the triumph of the Belgian Romantic school.