The Royal Museums of Fine Arts is a collection of six Brussels museums, of which we only actually visited one. At the time of our visit there were only four museums in this group, and before 1927 there was just one. This museum was established in 1801 by a decree from French First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte, with the museum’s doors first opening to the public in 1803. The museum was owned by the city of Brussels until 1842, when it was transferred to the state. Additional artworks were acquired over the years, with the older artworks (mainly pre-19th Century) eventually being split off into their own museum, the Museum of Ancient Art. This is the museum we visited. It now has the redundant name of Musée Oldmasters Museum and has quite a large collection. There is art from throughout Europe, but the emphasis, as one would expect, is on paintings produced in the area of present-day Belgium and the Netherlands.

We trudged back up the Coudenberg hill to where the Oldmasters Museum was located (along with a Modern Art museum and a museum devoted to Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte) and paid our admission fee. Normally there’s a direct connection between the Oldmasters Museum and the Modern Art museum, but the Modern Art museum was being renovated at the time of our visit, so that option was not available to us.

As we’d seen in numerous other museums, the earliest paintings in the Oldmasters Museum collection focused exclusively on Biblical themes. With certain episodes being more popular than others among artists (or sponsors), there was a fair amount of repetition in the themes, though there were a variety of interpretations. Some of the works depicted scenes from the Old Testament.


New Testament works seemed to be more plentiful, though.







Lives and deaths of saints, usually martyred, could be especially dramatic.



Eventually artists veered off into ancient mythological stories, which had plenty of (often salacious) drama of their own.



Some works were allegorical in nature, inviting viewers to come up with their own interpretations.

Artists eventually came to present-day reality for their subjects, depicting scenes from the lives of common people and from nature. The younger and elder Brueghels could produce canvases so crowded with figures that they looked like early "Where’s Waldo?" pictures.







After the Reformation, in Protestant areas artists didn’t have the decoration-minded Catholic church to rely on for business, so they ended up painting many portraits of members of the upper and middle classes. Many of these portraits were near-photographic in their accuracy.




Late in the 18th Century the American and French Revolutions brought profound challenges to the unquestioning obedience to royalty that had existed for centuries. Artists started to depict historical scenes reflecting these changes, eventually moving on into the Romantic area. But this is where the collection of the Oldmasters Museum came to an end.

We moved on ourselves, returning back down the hill to start packing up, as this was our last evening in Brussels. We enjoyed a leisurely dinner, reflecting on Brussels as a city for consumers (and not for dieters, as noted in a previous page), and thought about some of the things we had most enjoyed consuming. Which leads to our final Brussels page…