Belgium’s most prestigious art collection
Founded two centuries ago by Napoleon, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Belgium ranks among the country’s most treasured cultural institutions. Comprising six museums, three currently open — the Musée Oldmasters Museum, the Musée Meunier Museum and the Musée Magritte Museum — the complex holds an esteemed collection of approximately 20,000 paintings, sculptures and drawings 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 Older 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 Musée Wiertz Museum, Musée Fin-de-Siècle Museum and Musée Modern Museum remain closed for refurbishment.
