Belgium’s most prestigious art collection
Founded two centuries ago by Napoleon, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium rank among the country’s most treasured cultural institutions. Comprising four museums — the Musée Oldmasters Museum, the Musée Meunier Museum, the Musée Wiertz Museum and the Musée Magritte Museum — the complex holds an esteemed collection of approximately 20,000 paintings, sculptures and drawings that trace the visual arts from the 15th to the 21st centuries, preserving works by the Flemish primitives, Pieter Bruegel, Peter Paul Rubens, Jacques Jordaens, Jacques-Louis David, Auguste Rodin, James Ensor, Paul Gauguin, Ferdinand Khnopff, Henry Moore, Paul Delvaux, René Magritte, Marcel Broodthaers, Jan Fabre and many others.
The Magritte Museum features the world’s largest collection of the surrealist’s paintings and drawings; the Old Masters Museum is renowned for European paintings, especially the Flemish masters; while the Wiertz Museum and Meunier Museum are each dedicated to a single artist — the romantic painter Antoine Wiertz and 19th-century painter and sculptor Constantin Meunier, respectively, displayed in their studios-turned-museums. The Wiertz Museum is currently closed for refurbishment.
Photo © Odile Keromnes
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