Antoine Joseph Wiertz (22 February 1806 – 18 June 1865) was a Belgian painter, sculptor, lithographer and art writer.

Wiertz's artistic mentors at the academy, Mattheus Ignatius van Bree (1773-1839) and Willem Jacob Herreyns (1743-1827), further stimulated his love for Flemish painting and particularly for the work of Peter Paul Rubens.

[2] At the Paris Salon of 1839, Wiertz showed not only his Patrocles, but also three other works: Madame Laetitia Bonaparte on her deathbed, The fable of the three wishes — Man's insatiability and Christ entombed.

Badly hung and lit, his entry elicited indifference on the part of the public, and provoked sarcasm among the critics.

Charles Baudelaire described Wiertz as '...that infamous poseur, […] a charlatan, idiot, thief […] who does not know how to draw and whose stupidity is as massive as his giants'.

[3] Many of his works from the 1850s have a social or philosophical message, often translated in delirious imagery, like Hunger, Madness and Crime (1853), The Reader of Novels (1853), Suicide (1854), The premature burial (1854) and The last gun (1855).

As a sculptor, he produced his most important project towards the end of his life: a series of plasters representing The Four Ages of Man (1860–1862), reproduced in marble for the Wiertz museum by Auguste Franck.

Influenced mainly by Rubens and the late Michelangelo, Wiertz' monumental painting often moves between classical academism and lurid romanticism, between the grandiose and the ridiculous.

After difficult negotiations with the Belgian government, Wiertz was able to realize his dream to turn his last studio into a museum for his works.

The Belgian State bought a piece of land and funded the construction of a huge hall to accommodate the painter's monumental works.

His remains were embalmed in accordance with Ancient Egyptian burial rites and buried in a vault in the municipal cemetery of Ixelles.

A copy of one of Antoine Wiertz's works, the statue of The Triumph of Light was once prominently located high on San Francisco's Mount Olympus between the Haight-Ashbury and Corona Heights.