The wait

The Wait by Antoine Wiertz from 1844 shares its title with Ensor's 1880 work but belongs to an entirely different artistic universe. For Wiertz, waiting was likely a subject of psychological intensity rather than domestic quietude — his engagement with states of anticipation tended toward the existential rather than the anecdotal. By 1844 Wiertz had recently returned from Rome, where a Prix de Rome fellowship had exposed him to antique sculpture and Renaissance fresco, and he was in the process of developing the grand style he believed would position him alongside Rubens and Michelangelo. The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium hold this work as part of a collection that attempts to document Wiertz's full range. The theme of waiting in mid-nineteenth-century Belgian painting often carried religious or metaphysical connotations — waiting for divine intervention, for judgement, for love's arrival — and Wiertz would have been unlikely to treat the subject with the domestic restraint of a Dutch genre painter. The painting's date places it in his most productive and ambitious decade.

At this stage in his career Wiertz had absorbed the lessons of the Italian masters encountered during his Rome fellowship, and his figure painting shows a new command of idealised form and monumental composition. The handling combines academic precision in the figure's modelling with more atmospheric treatment of the surrounding space. Wiertz's palette in this period is typically warm-toned with strong shadows, influenced by the chiaroscuro he had studied in Caravaggio and the Baroque masters.