Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium
Federal art museums on the Coudenberg hill, combining Old Masters galleries with the Magritte Museum.
The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium are a federal institution whose collections trace their origin to 1801, when Napoleonic decree established a museum in Brussels. The main building on the Rue de la Régence, designed by Alphonse Balat and opened in 1887, is a monumental neoclassical block with a colonnaded portico and a top-lit sculpture hall. Today the group brings together several museums, of which the Old Masters Museum and the Magritte Museum occupy the Place Royale site.
The Old Masters Museum covers painting and sculpture from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, with a concentration of Flemish work including Bruegel, Rubens, Van der Weyden and Jordaens. The Magritte Museum, opened in 2009 in the adjoining Hôtel Altenloh, presents a large holding of works, letters and photographs by René Magritte across several floors. Modern and contemporary rooms, a sculpture gallery and temporary exhibition spaces complete the visit, and satellite houses elsewhere in the city belong to the same institution.
Highlights
- Balat's 1887 neoclassical galleries above the Place Royale
- Bruegel, Rubens and early Netherlandish painting in the Old Masters Museum
- Magritte Museum with several floors devoted to the Surrealist painter
- Top-lit central sculpture hall and monumental entrance staircase
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