Gustaaf Wappers (Antwerp 1803 – Paris 1874) was the chef de file of Romantic historical painting in Belgium. In his native Antwerp he was trained in the manner of  thelate Baroque and neoclassicism by Willem Jacob Herreyns (1743–1828) and Matthijs Ignaas van Bree (1773–1839), who also pointed him in the direction of national history as a subject matter and a source of inspiration. Starting his career during the United-Netherlandic period in Belgian history (1815-30), Wappers visited the North to study the Dutch masters. In 1825 he painted The visit of the Cardinal Infante don Fernando to the gouty Rubens. Rubens, who after 1830 became Belgium’s most revered and most canonically “national” artist (and the first one to receive a statue in the new Belgian state, by Geefs, 1843), became a major reference, as the discovery of Romanticism and of Eugène Delacroix in Paris prompted the young artist to focus on the national past and artistic tradition.

Wappers’s first public triumph came with The self-sacrifice of Mayor Van der Werff (1829), on an episode from the 1574 Siege of Leiden, itself a key event in the Dutch Revolt against Spain; the same subject had been treated by Wappers’s teacher Van Bree in 1817. Wappers’s treatment marks the (somewhat belated) starting point of Romantic painting in Belgium. Ironically, the painting, on a Northern Netherlandic theme, was exhibited mere weeks before the Southern Netherlands seceded from the United Netherlandic Kingdom. Originally intended as a loyal tribute to that United Kingdom’s shared past, it was soon re-interpreted as a civic-liberal, and therefore Belgian scene. The artist, indeed, devoted his next large canvas (660 × 444 cm) to the Episode from the September Days 1830 on the Grand Place in Brussels (1835), generally considered his magnum opus. Celebrating the defeat of the Netherlandic state troops by the insurrectionary population of Brussels in an allegorical and almost operatic spectacle of revolutionary and patriotic enthusiasm, it is evidently inspired by Delacroix’ representation of the spirit of Liberty leading the Parisian July Revolution (1830). Among the figures the artist himself is represented, thus casting himself as a revolutionary and participant to the historic events.

The Episode from the September Days made Wappers a role model and the harbinger of a Belgian wave of monumental historical painting in the late 1830s and 1840s, with among others The Battle of the Golden Spurs (1836) by Nicaise de Keyser (1813–1887), La Belgique couronnant ses enfants illustres (1839) by Henri de Caisne (1799–1852), The Compromise of the Nobles (1841) by Edouard de Biefve (1808–1882) and The abdication of Charles V (1841) by Louis Gallait (1810–1887). They were influential representatives of a semi-official national historicism by means of which Belgium legitimized itself as an independent nation-state. Some of these paintings travelled and were admired abroad, inspiring, notably, history painting in Germany. The fact that Wappers did not only depict scenes from the national past but also set his genre paintings in various parts of European history – Tsar Peter the Great in Zaandam, the French King Louis XVII, Boccaccio, “Christopher Columbus in prison” – contributed to his international fame. In 1850, Anselm Feuerbach came to Antwerp to study under him.

Wappers’s Romantic innovativeness in the 1830s, his success and his service to the national cause gained him official and institutional recognition. At a young age he was appointed Belgium’s official court painter by King Leopold I. In 1840 Wappers became director of the Academy of Antwerp, which with its counterpart in Brussels was the country’s most important artistic institution. He used his prestige and power to support men like Hendrik Conscience (1812–1883), author of the formative historical novel The Lion of Flanders (1838); Wappers (to whom Conscience dedicated the novel) sketched its frontispiece, an iconic image of a lion breaking his chains. From the late 1840s his position and work were subject to challenges; in 1853 he resigned from his presidency of the Antwerp academy, probably as the result of a conflict with his colleague, rival and successor Nicaise de Keyser, and settled in Paris, where lived and worked until his death in 1874.