These included Funeral of Charles the Good, which was so large and contained so many figures that van Beers said he only recouped the costs of production, despite selling it for 12,000 Francs.

[3] In 1880 he moved to Paris and immediately abandoned historical pictures, producing instead genre and portrait works of the middle classes and developing a successful line in attractive draped young ladies reading a letter or a book or day-dreaming about a lover.

In his novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy mentions "the staring and ghastly attitudes of a Wiertz Museum and with the leer of a study by Van Beers".

[3] In addition to Van Beers' languid ladies, he painted a number of portraits of men, genre scenes and pictures in an orientalist style.

In 1879, Huysmans described Van Beers' submission to that year's Salon as "demented colours, absurd and crazy notions, a hotch-potch of ancient and modern mixed up on a single canvas".

The Review de l’Art Moderne defended van Beers, suggesting that the critics and other artists were jealous of his commercial success.