The Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium is a combination of the Museum of Old Art and the Museum of Modern Art, located next to the Royal Palace of Brussels, the Antoine Wirtz Museum and the Constantin Meunier Museum. It contains a large collection of paintings and sculpture belonging to the state, collected dating back to the reign of the Austrian kings. These treasures were then looted by French revolutionary troops and taken to Paris. Only after Napoleon's death Napoleon's death, all confiscated masterpieces were returned to their homeland.
The new kings Wilhelm I and Leonidas I acquired for the museum many art canvases for the museum, and the former burgomaster of Brussels donated invaluable Flemish primitivist art, which greatly expanded the museum's collection. For example, the exhibition from old collections presents works by Flemish, French and Italian painters.
From the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the main part of the exhibition is devoted to Belgian paintings, in the Habsburg palace. A collection of 20th century works is located in the an annex to the building. The numbering of the halls of the Museum of Fine Arts is indicated not by numbers, but by letters. Here you can see paintings by world-famous Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling, Quentin Masseys and the triptych "The Seven Mysteries" by Rogier van der Weyden and others. The photographic accuracy is characterised by The painting "Memories" by the Belgian artist Fernand Knopor, which is one of the highlights of the collection.
In Ixelles, a suburb of Brussels, there is the Antoine Wirtz Museum (opened in 1868) and the Constantin Meunier Museum (opened in 1978), part of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts. They exhibit works by the masters of surrealism.
Visiting the Museum of Fine Arts, you will be able to see unknown works by great artists as well as the work of lesser-known painters.
